I've not made a bit deal out of this, but I like source control systems, I like git, I even like subversion, I like when folks even take the time to zip up the whole project tree and stick it on a whole other machine. All are different source control strategies, each have their place.
What doesn't have a place in my opinion is poor implementations of this... such as... When there is no source control, that folks "remember" how the code was and can work back to where it was when things go wry.
Because inevitably they can't remember. Solutions, subtly and satisfaction with what was present can easily be lost. And in such situations you can only blame yourself for not having a back up of the original or yesterdays or whatever.
So it was as part of the tyrannical "lead" of one developer I came to meet the worst source control system ever, it was based on floppy disks, had no back up and was a manual process.
And it starts with an initial checkout, to a CD-R.
The CD-R was known as the "master" disc, and it contained a set of the SQL scripts to build an instance of the database, a series of sequential updates which each quarter were compacted down and made into one new "CREATE DATABASE/TABLE" thing.
Then there was an auxiliary folder with a bunch of tools which you copied to your hard drive and used.
And finally there was the source tree, you installed Microsoft Visual C++ 6 and opened the project and built the code.
You then ran a tool and put a floppy disk in, this disk was used as a swap between you and the lead developer at the end of the day, so a nightly build could be carried out (or a morning build on a Monday after a weekend) on a slightly more powerful machine.
As a developer then you had you IDE, this background tool running and you worked as you normally would.
Every time you would save in the IDE the tool saw the change in date of the source code file blatting that file onto the floppy. The whole file, overwriting the old, not a delta, not a diffable solution, it just progressed forwards only.
You could not revert, not compare, not really do anything we take for granted in modern development.
This was a bad system.
The bad became worse when there was a delay between the save & the tool picking up, and then a floppy disk took time to write ( a lot of time ) and it was soon realized whilst it was writing the file from the HDD to the floppy it locked the file, so you couldn't write another copy of the file whilst this slow write was in progress.
As such lots of developers didn't run the tool, they would run it once at the end of the day, or just copy all the files listed as date/time changed to the floppy manually.
This floppy was then the feedback of all changes to the lead, in charge of merging the changes... Well I say merge, what happened was the mainline version was simply over written with whatever the developer handed over. They were meant to qualify their code was coo, they were meant to run the tool which performed the copy.
So all the pieces were on the board and check-mate was one move away.
For the worst moment came on one particular Friday, a developer was toiling on tidy up duties, those little tasks you put off until the end of a day to fill time until you can go home, his task this day at 5:03pm was to correct two typo's in a file, one higher up and one lower down.
Just spelling mistakes, no need to recompile that, taking an hour, on a Friday with the pub and a takeaway calling.
So the chap performed his save, saw the light come on the disk and then did the second correction, hit save, the floppy light went off... and he turned his machine off... just dead off... pulled the floppy and dropping it into the "merge tray" on the leads desk started his weekend.
I walked into this on the Monday morning at 8am, as a very junior developer, the managers were all present, the lead was present, two senior devs were pawing over floppy disks in no discernible order.
For it turned out that the tool had started to overwrite the second save of the file, it had gotten so far through the write when the power had been pulled. The original was lost on the developers machine for he had pulled the power... rather than shutting down.
And this source control system only went forwards, you could never ever regress.
The seniors were trying to build a delta list of each change for the last month, back to the start of the last CD-R... From floppies which had been used and reused, they had to manually inspect the changes between the file in question in the floppies.
If the copy they had was deemed to be older the disk was put aside.
If younger the file was copied into a directory to slowly try and catch the code up.
Around 10am the developer responsible wondered in, listened to the complaints, listened to everyone being exacerbated and then without a blink of irony said "Told you this wasn't source control".
Fabulous...
The worse Source Control ever?... Perforce... Hands down, Perforce.
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