Friday 29 July 2022

Embarrassing #3: Source Control

We spin far forwards not to around 2016; and the development manager wonders over to me and asks my opinion on source control software.  GIT.  Is my reply, just Git no other shenanigans.  But he wants a report.

I duly go take a look... I've suffered CVS, SVN and a myriad of other source control solutions, Git has always worked solidly for me, in over a decade I've had one fault with it - and was able to recover from that problem easily.  That is fabulous uptime for me and nearly zero support because anyone using my repo's could just learn (or google) a bit of git.

SVN was the other main source control solution I advocated, it's issues are many, but it worked for the problems I was dealing with (indeed on my youtube you will find subversion tutorials from back in the day).

This manager however wanted more than opinion, I wrote him a pro's and con's, I went to the public for their opinion and looked at a few closed source alternatives; like perforce.

Cost was a MAJOR issue for this company, the cost to install Git was zero.  The cost to install Perforce was nearly £27,800.  It was a clear win win for Git and vouched for it again, arguing it'd be better to pay for a whole other junior developer; or paying the ones we have now that little bit more each than going for Perforce.

(And I'm being harsh here, but I don't like perforce, I see the "game industry" using it as a default goto, but I do not see why, it has bitten me more than a dozen times in four years of heavy use - I compare that to once in over ten for git and it's just a no brainer even before the costs; and git will do the huge repo's and do them better than perforce can - which was the default argument before that git didn't do huge repo's or source tree's... erm, hello, Linux is completely on it and huge.... Microsoft have moved to it, so windows, edge and so much of their stack is all hosted on git repo's - stop arguing for perforce, it's embarrassing, seriously).

So this manager took away my report.

They bought Perforce, six months later, he's getting the nagware for license renewal, per seat.  £12,000.  This just beggars belief.

The manager was wrong, the money was spent, the company still disappeared with a whimper, it was a waste.  He should have been embarrassed by that; I doubt he was.

But the management should have been far more embarrassed letting him operate the way he did.

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