>--- Forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Bill Lee wrote:
>> I have worked in closed environments for a long time using reserved checkout
>> systems such as MKS, PVCS, and SourceSafe.
>Ditto, although my experience is only with CVS and (shudder) SS.
>> In this environment, where many
>> people may be working on the same set of files, and often same file; where
>> there are common programming disciplines and guidelines, I have found the
>> reserved checkout scheme more reliable than merging. Merging, in my
>> experience, by developers of a variety of skill levels has allowed hard to
>> find bugs to creep in when conflicts are manually resolved or not detected.
>Very much disagreed. I have used both methods extensively, and merging
>rarely has caused me (or anyone else I know) any problems, while reserved
>checkout results in many hours of lost productivity as the individual
>programmers find their hands tied.
>In my experience, if two pieces of code don't merge properly, it's because
>two programmers were working on the *exact* same functionality, and just
>wrote them differently. In this case you have a much larger problem
>than anything revision control can help you with - you've got a communication/
>leadership problem with your team.
Something else to consider is this: With the more traditional
checkout/checkin model, people tend to keep their work isolated from each
other for long periods of time. The longer the developers are out of
synch, the larger the differences in their workspaces, and the more difficult
is becomes to resolve them during merges.
One of the strengths of the concurrent model is that the developers
synch their workspaces more frequently, while the merges are smaller and
easier. Most of the time, the merges are completely automatic, provided
an ASCII text merge can produce meaningful results.
But with this ability to synch up with smaller changes comes the
responsibility of each developer to be more disciplined with the code they
check in; it has to be good, otherwise they'll have a lot of unhappy people
knocking down their door.
>--- End of forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
