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Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

danielsada.tech

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Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#61

Post by xwolfi »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #10

We communicated the same information through multiple channels: weekly emails, Teams, wiki docs, team presentations, and office hours. The rule: if something was important, people heard it at least 3 times through different mediums. If only this were standard. Last week I received the only notification that a bunch of internal systems were being deleted in two weeks . No scream test, no archiving, just straight delet…

What we do is we scream the day before, all of us, get replied that we should have read the memo, reply we have real work to do, and the thing gets cancelled last minute, a few times a year, until nobody gives a fuck anymore.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#62

Post by neerajsi »

dybber wrote: post #47
MBCook wrote: post #31

Could someone explain the ideas of forward integration and reverse integration in Source Depot? I’d never heard of Source Depot before today.

We had a similar setup, also with a homegrown VCS developed internally in our company, where I sometimes acted as branch admin. I’m not sure it worked exactly like Source Depot, but I can try to explain it. Basically instead of everyone creating their own short-lived branches (expensive operation), you would have long-lived branches that a larger group of people would commit to (several product areas). The branch adm…

At least in the Windows group, we use ri and fi oppositely from how you describe. RI = sharing code with a broader group of people toward trunk. FI = absorbing code created by the larger group of people on the dev team. Eventually we do a set of release forks that are isolated after a final set of FIs, so really outside customers get code via FI and then cherry pick style development.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#63

Post by tux1968 »

carlual wrote: post #50
dshacker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it was a whole journey. I can't believe it happened. Thanks for your comment.

Thank you! Btw, it reminds me of the book "Showstopper" about the journey of releasing Windows NT; highly recommended!

Thanks for the recommendation! I was just about to reread "Soul Of A New Machine", but will try Showstopper instead, since it sounds to be the same genre.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#64

Post by RyJones »

RandallBrown wrote: post #53
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #36

I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe… They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…

I doubt most teams ever used it. I spent a couple years at Microsoft and our team used Source Depot because a lot of people thought that our products were special and even Microsoft's own source control (TFS at the time) wasn't good enough. I had used TFS at a previous job and didn't like it much, but I really missed it after having to use Source Depot.

USGEO used it in the late 90s, as well as RAID

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#67

Post by indemnity »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #10

We communicated the same information through multiple channels: weekly emails, Teams, wiki docs, team presentations, and office hours. The rule: if something was important, people heard it at least 3 times through different mediums. If only this were standard. Last week I received the only notification that a bunch of internal systems were being deleted in two weeks . No scream test, no archiving, just straight delet…

I feel this.

Every month or two, we get notifications along the FINAL WARNING lines, telling us about some critical system about to be deleted, or some new system that needs to be set up Right Now, because it is a Corporate Standard (that was never rolled out properly), and by golly we have had enough of teams ignoring us, the all powerful Board has got its eyes on you now.

It's a full time job to keep up with the never-ending churn. We could probably just spend all our engineering effort being compliant and never delivering features :)

Company name withheld to preserve my anonymity (100,000+ employees).

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#68

Post by hulitu »

sherdil2022 wrote: post #4
mrheosuper wrote: post #2

[flagged]

If it were that simple, would 100s of engineers spend so much time and effort? They did what they have to and spent the time and energy to maintain some semblance of commit and change history.

> If it were that simple, would 100s of engineers spend so much time and effort?

Taking into acvount that they rounded corners in Office, I would say, yes.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#70

Post by tamlin »

palmotea wrote: post #66

What's the connection (if any) between "Source Depot" and TFSVC?

Source Depot was based on Perforce. Microsoft bought a license for the Perforce source code and made changes to work at Microsoft scale (Windows, Office).

TFS was developed in the Studio team. It was designed to work on Microsoft scale and some teams moved over to it (SQL server). It was also available as a fairly decent product (leagues better than SourceSafe).

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