[fpc-other] Git & SVN

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, noreply at z505.com said:
> >> impossible person is usually swiftly dealt with.
> 
> > 
> > Honestly, I can't even... You sound like the Expert Beginner Twitter
> > account. No personal offense intended, but you just do.
> > 
> 
> He's talking about Army of Programmers in a Building, an article I wrote 
> years ago ;-)
> 
> Sometimes it's better to just walk over and talk to a real programmer in 
> a real building than it is to send some email over the christmas 
> holidays and wait 2 weeks for a reply for him to commit his changes.. 
> since he's in Barbados or Cuba on vacation.

The scenario was based on older commercial VCS systems (VSS, that Team thing
from Borland etc etc) that required explicit locking, and people would lock
files, change some formatting and then go on holiday before their real work
started.  During that time nobody could make changes to those files, and
even back then we already had some form of CI to a testserver that worked
from the VCS, so that also hampered testing your own mods.

Locks were notorious hard to break, and persons with the required
rights were often also rare during those periods.

And yes, if you did that, specially if the file was something central (like
a file that listed all commands accepted by the command processor), people
could get somewhat aggressive ;-)

The DVCS scenario is not as bad, but some simple prevention of this would
prevent some mistakes, and make the minefield for new devels a bit smaller,
thus save a lot of annoyance on all sides.