Question

I’m curious to hear about people’s experiences with distributed version control in a corporate environment.

Specifically:

1. Was it difficult to gain adoption?
2. Now that it’s in place, is it well liked?
3. What ‘model’ are you using (hub & spoke? Something else?)
4. Allowing you use hub & spoke, are there any discipline problems with pushing to a central server?
5. I’d like to hear if anyone has non-programmers working within this environment, preferably artists and the like to whom VCS can be a bit daunting. Did it work out for them?

Answer 1

1 – No, because we just told people they had to use it. If you don’t have control over your VCS and your staff, you have bigger issues…

2 – Well, going from SVN to Git, I would say about half the developers complained about the added complexity. The other half appreciated the increased power.

3 – We designated one server to be the central repository by convention.

4 – None – I mean if people don’t push to the right server, then their work is not considered complete, so cannot be integrated, QAed, etc. If they cannot follow the guidelines for this kind of thing….same as #1 above.

5 – That’s a good question. We encourage our non-technical staff to use GUI tools where possible, and that seems to make things much simpler for them. Pretty much all the developers use the command-line, unless they are viewing branch history or some other visual reason.