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New Is source control especially hard in WIndows? Or is it all compiled languages?
The bulk of my development has been PHP. I never had problems keeping everyone on the same version - if you don't count the guy who would "fix" stuff in his local branch and never bother to check it in.

Every Windows shop I've ever worked in they have constant challenges with rebuilding csproj files, having the wrong assemblies, etc. etc. etc.

Is this a compiled vs. interpreted issue, or is it something about Windows that makes this so difficult? Is it that Visual Studio trains people not to worry about details that "shouldn't matter" to them, so they never bother to learn how to deal with source control with multiple users?
--

Drew
New My experience with Visual Studio
Was that it was a dumpster fire when it came to builds. This was something like 6-7 years ago however.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New It is not the languages
I mainly use Eclipse (Java, C, Python & Perl). I've never run into the kind of issues VC presents, regardless of the language category. Most issues related to source control have been due to the limitations of the SCM tool used. That said, Git integration does suffer from idiosyncrasies on the part of the eGit plugin developers.

VC++ does do "magic" things when it comes to include files, resulting in code that may not work on another compiler.
New I wonder if there's a Microsoft attitude somewhere.
Normally the biggest problem I have with Windows devs is getting their code editors to do the right thing about line endings.

But I've worked with .NET programmers before over server-to-server integration and both times they had trouble seeing the programming world outside the tools and libraries MS gave them. One dev in particular was very naive about ways to construct and parse XML that the MS library couldn't handle or didn't like. It made for some frustrating debugging a few times...

Wade.
New My guess: PEBCAK. [Edit:] Caused by Windows. [/Edit]
After an initial bout with Visual Source Safe some fifteen years ago, I've only been using sensible source control (i.e, git[1]) for a couple of years now. Yup, apparently the BI world really is pretty different than app dev mainstream... But also apparently closing in on it. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so), this is also about the amount of time I've been using Macs[2]; that'll be three years in September. (I was offered the choice when I started here, and took the Mac precisely because I'd never used one for real, thought it was finally time to find out; haven't regretted it for a second.)

The team was 100% Mac for a week more, when member #4 joined. She used Windows, and was the one initially responsible for setting up our git environment. Poor girl struggled like Hell with that, and when she left us in the Spring of '15 I got to step into her shoes as team source control coordinator; and yes, they felt like size 38[3] high-heel pumps to begin with... Since then, the team has grown from five to... I think it's thirteen at the moment, thereabouts. Most of us use Macs; one guy who has since transferred out to another unit was on Windows, another recently switched to a Mac. Perhaps one or two of our Business Analysts (=PowerPoint Warriors, as I understand it) are on Windows, but that doesn't matter here because they don't much use source control, since they don't code. Our latest addition, though, does, because he is supposed to take over maintenance of our "old stack" (=PDI[4]) jobs from me if all goes well (of which I still have some hope, but also my (ever-increasing) doubts).

So in the last couple years I've been teaching our tools and processes to, uh... five to seven people, depending on how you count -- two just git, five PDI + git -- with the last of these ongoing for two weeks now (though the first week was 40 % short, since I took the Friday after Ascension off). Ooooh Kay... Long setup, finally arrived at the start of the actual story (=anecdotal "evidence"):

Of these seven pupils, three (including the current one) were on Windows at the time, four on Macs. And to the best of my recollection, all the Windows users have struggled more with grasping version control, both conceptually and practically, than the Mac users. Ironically -- at least if you're an old fart from the time when Windows was built on DOS, and Macs didn't have a command line -- this seems to correlate pretty much exactly to Mac users being more comfortable with the command line, and Windows users nowadays being more the point-and-click-only type.

Oh yeah, one final thing: PDI is of course very much not a compiled language, but I can't see what that's got to do with anything. It has dependencies and shit too.




[1]: And (ex) Stash / (now) BitBucket.
[2]: Plural, because I'm on my second one -- dropped the first off my lap while couch-surfing the 'Net (just like now...), cracked the screen. Had to work only on the external screen for a couple months, while this one was squeezed through the delivery bottleneck.
[3]: ~7 in weird Anglophone units? 6?
[4]: Pentaho Data Integration

--
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi

(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
Expand Edited by CRConrad June 4, 2017, 08:32:12 PM EDT
New On compiled language and dependencies
I may be misunderstanding this, but it looks to me like the interpreted language I used - PHP - has an interpreter and a set of common extensions that provide the base functions. If the core interpreter or any of the extensions is an older or newer version than what you expected, it still tries to execute your code. It might throw errors if you're using one of the features that changed, but otherwise it would work.

With Windows, if you don't have the same version in your dev environment as you have on the server it compiles into executables/dlls that won't even load on the server - even if you're not using any of the changed features. I believe this is a design decision, as it forces the upgrade treadmill.

VS also seems to encourage monolithic assemblies so you can't pull in just the libraries you need. Add one thing and it pulls in the world with it. This may have some theoretical performance improvements, as you only need to load each component once for all the apps using it, but at the expense of dependency trees that are a bear to maintain.
--

Drew
     Is source control especially hard in WIndows? Or is it all compiled languages? - (drook) - (5)
         My experience with Visual Studio - (malraux)
         It is not the languages - (scoenye)
         I wonder if there's a Microsoft attitude somewhere. - (static)
         My guess: PEBCAK. [Edit:] Caused by Windows. [/Edit] - (CRConrad) - (1)
             On compiled language and dependencies - (drook)

But don't get all fretty-pants on us.
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