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Windows & .NET Watch: Get onboard the DVCS train

By Larry O'Brien

December 15, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
On the first project in which I used a Distributed Version Control System, I wondered what was such a big deal. Version Control is, it seems to me, one of the less interesting aspects of software development, an unfortunate artifact of the extraordinary plasticity of our work, shared source code, and the reality of dead ends and bugs. Now I’m fully converted. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

We used to say that using version control was one of the tell-tales between amateur and professional developers. In those days, version control used a “check-out, check-in” model. It was like a library: If you needed to touch a function, you made a request to the central repository. If no one else had checked out the file, you would be granted the global lock, which you’d retain until you checked the file back in.

It was undeniably intrusive, especially in the pre-object-orientation days when modules were generally structured in functional categories or abstraction levels. While a trivial programming task might only touch a file or two, harder tasks were generally spread broadly throughout the codebase, and it was common to be thwarted by the need to make a single-line correction in some large file that had been checked out for days by someone struggling with a function hundreds of lines away.

The advantage of the library model was that it forced a deliberate consideration of whether a change was appropriate or not. Additionally, it pressured you to make minimal change sets; the organizational pressure to hold a minimum number of check-out locks encouraged a quick, single-file check-in after the common situation of making a besides-the-point refactoring or small change.

I suppose it was in the late 1990s when the “lock-free” model of version control made rapid gains. This is the model that most of us use today: One is free to change any file in the project, and at check-in, one must reconcile situations where your changes conflict with changes introduced since you had begun work. This model is reliant on text-comparison algorithms that attempt to automatically merge files. These algorithms do tolerably well, although I’m sure we’d all be appalled if presented with the number of minutes we’ve accumulated manually fixing merges after our diff tools “got confused.”

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Comments

12/16/2010 06:20:39 PM EST

Good article. Your train metaphor & Vincent's branching model diagrams are helpful. The VCS history and perspective is entertaining and reminds me a bit of my (somewhat contrived) March post on this subject. Check it out (pun intended) at: http://derekwilliams.us/?p=1546.

United StatesDerek Williams

12/27/2010 09:18:50 PM EST

I don't understand what you are trying to say, DVCS or CVCS both encourage small change set, none promote long live branches. DVCS won't solve merge conflicts any better than any other merge tracking VCS and if you have your developers change the same lines in the same file or make logical conflicting changes (because they are not in each other's way that day) won't make you any more effective/productive. It might be hip, but CVCS have had branch and merge for ages and the same good practices still apply to DVCS:es. Branches were never about true parallell development (which is ineffective/unproductive), it is, as I see it, an anti pattern, because it means your code has a small (albeit hard to fix) where two disjoint functions requires changes in the same class. branches have always been about clean change sets (no matter if it is a feature branch, maintainance branch or development branch).

SwedenNiclas Lindgren

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