Hacker News Reader

Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

SVN was a thing by the mid-2000's, and history from that is easy to preserve in git. Just how old are the sourcebases in question? (Not to shoot the messenger; just like, wow.)

edit:typo

View on HN

I maintain a C++ codebase that was originally written in 1996, and is mission critical for my organization. Originally maintained in Visual Sourcesafe, then in TFS source control, and now git. Some parts of it were rewritten (several times) in C#, but the core is still C++.

I was very worried when we transitioned to git that history will not be preserved and tried to preserve it, but it proved too much hassle so I dropped it.

In fact that proved not to be a problem. Well, not a problem for me, since I remember all the history of the code and all the half forgotten half baked features and why they are there. But if I'm gone then yes, it's going to be a problem. It's in a dire need for a rewrite, but this has been postponed again and again.

The first large C++ project I worked on in mid-1990s was basically preserving a bunch of archived copies of the source tree. CVS was a thing but not on Windows, and SourceSafe was creating more problems than it been solving.

I kept regular tarballs of a project that used SourceSafe right near the start of my career, and found I was more likely to be able to find an intact copy of the right thing to diff against from my tarballs.

I think after a year or so I realised that even bothering to -try- to use SourceSafe was largely silly, got permission to stop, and installed a CVS server on a dev box for my own use.

(yes I know the VCS server shouldn't really be on the dev box I could potentially trash, I didn't have another machine handy and it was still a vast improvement)

Some of these systems dated back to the 1970s. The worst offenders were from the 1980s and 1990s though.

It's all about the team or organization and their laziness or non-laziness.

I've had issues doing decent copies from SVN to GIT. They both have different ideas about user identity, and how fragmented it can be.

I looked at a C++ codebase from 1997 at a previous job - I don't know much about the history but comments in one of the old files tracked dates and changes to 2001. Not sure what happened after that but in 2017 someone copy-pasted the project from TFS to git and obliterated the prior history.

I've heard a lot of stories about mid-90s codebases for sure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com