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This is the path I took for a few projects years ago when Google Code didn’t support git.

Switched to mercurial from svn and workflow was painless for the team. Interestingly, we slowly started adopting more distributed techniques like developer merges being common. With svn, I think I was the only one who could merge and it would be rare and added product risk.

Then after about a year of mercurial we switched to git and our brains had adapted. Our team was small, 5-10 people.

Somewhat relatedly, in 2002, I worked in a large team of 75 people or so with a large codebase of a few hundred thousand lines of active dev. It used Rational ClearCase had “big merges” that happened once or twice a release with thousands of files requiring reconciliation. There was a team who did this so it was annoying to dev in, but largely I didn’t care.

Company went through layoffs and the team was down to one. He quit, the company couldn’t merge, so couldn’t release new software versions.

There was a big crisis so they went to the architects and pulled a few out of dev work. It turns out I was the one who could figure it out and dumb enough to admit it.

That sucked. It took a few weeks to sort out and modify our dev process to make merges easy and common. But it was not fun. Upside is we ended up not having any “non-programmer” op/configuration management people since the layed off/quit team were ClearCase users, who didn’t code.

Moral- don’t let people know you can do hard, mundane tasks.




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