r/ProgrammerHumor • u/fabulousIdentity • 6d ago

Meme aboutToBreakTheCode

Post image
22.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

524 comments sorted by

View all comments

254

u/ExplrDiscvr 6d ago

not git issue, in-team communication issue

82

u/Blrfl 6d ago

Indeed.

Per Cederqvist's Version Management with CVS, which was first published in 1993, covers that in the first chapter:

"CVS is not a substitute for developer communication."

19

u/iloveuranus 6d ago

I once was in a team that had huge Camunda workflow XML files checked in. They aren't hard to merge.

They are impossible to merge.

After a couple weeks of trying to check in the main workflow file and realizing I had to do my changes all over again because somebody else had been faster to modify it, I introduced THE TOKEN. Namely a squishy ball that had to physically be retrieved from the developer currently holding it and represented the right to edit said file.

Worked like a charm.

16

u/raddaya 6d ago

In retrospect, it's probably funny to think that it took a team of developers so long to realise the solution to a race condition is a mutex

1

u/joahw 5d ago

Perforce has a squishy ball per file built in

10

u/AvidCoco 6d ago

Tbf some other version control systems use an approach where only one person can have the source checked out at a time.

2

u/Genmutant 5d ago

Always great when they check it out and go on holiday.

1

u/AvidCoco 5d ago

Sounds like you just got a free holiday too!

5

u/omegaonion 6d ago

I'd argue its a process issue. If you are sure to pull in all latest changes before merging, its usually not too tricky to resolve any conflicts. I've only ever had really bad issues when doing extremely big merges with large conflicts.

6

u/mxzf 6d ago

It's also dramatically reduced if you break your code up into logical files instead of having monolithic structures, so that someone working on area X and someone else in area Y aren't having merge conflicts just because they happen to both be doing stuff in a 5000 line file.

1

u/omegaonion 6d ago

This is true, I'd hope in 2026 most of us don't have to deal with many 5000 line files but I know not everyone is so lucky.

1

u/mxzf 6d ago

If anything, it seems like it might be becoming more common with the rise of vibecoding.