I just joined a new team (very small: four developers in total, with two of those leaving soon). The two original developers set up the git repo on a folder in a Windows network share.
Am I taking crazy pills, or is that a bad idea? Our organization does have github/gitlab/bitbucket available, so is there any good reason not to use those hosted solutions?
Do you mean a bare repo you use as a remote and push/pull from or using the workdir straight from the share. The first would be strange, but kinda usable (don’t do this though), the latter is oh my god, get an other job category.
Yes, it’s definitely the former case, thankfully. Agreed that it’s strange, but it’s hard to put a technical reason behind it if I decide to push for hosting it somewhere better.
Working from the network share - I’ve worked on a project like this before, it was awful for developer experience. It took seconds to run a git status, it was so slow. Occasionally git would lock itself out of being able to update files, since the network read/write times were so slow. Large merges were impossible.
The reason it was set up like this was that the CEO had the network share we were working off of set up to serve to a subdomain (so like, Bob’s work would be at bob.example.com), and it would update live as most hot-reloads will do. He wanted to be able to spy on developers and see what they were doing at any given time.
I have a lot of programming horror stories from that job. The title of this thread brought up a lot of repressed memories.
Still a better version control than 20210131_v0.2_test2_john
Our organization does have github/gitlab/bitbucket available
Do you mean “cloud services”? Maybe your colleagues don’t want them there.
For PCI-DSS relevant code, we only use internal systems.
I would have to agree on this, it seems rather odd if the code repo is confidential or classified to be shared on a Windows Share. The reason why we would use Git services (self-hosted) is so that we have multitude of security services/layers maintained by dedicated team of system administrators such as firewall, service update, data redundancy, backup, active directory and so forth.
I can see a scenario where people accidentally put classified repos or information that aren’t supposed to be shared on Windows Share where unauthorized users could view that repos.
That may be the case, but the original engineers have made other highly questionable decisions: the backend service was written in Java 8…just last year!
Are you concerned about corruption due to multiple users? Are you using the repo in the intended way? Then it’s fine. Git has locking mechanisms. Pull, work, commit, push.
I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but something feels off. For example, on my first day, I wasn’t able to view the files in Windows Explorer (or clone the repo, actually), so the other dev just gave me a zip file of the repo. There’s something fishy going on, and I’m trying to figure it out.
Since it’s on a network share, there’s the extra overhead of managing the file system permissions. And you probably hadn’t received access at the point.
That probably is the case, but in my mind I’m also questioning if they’re backing it up regularly, what prevents someone from going in and deleting the files, etc.
It is fine. But for your personal growth and some more peace of mind, you should migrate the repository to one of the git services of your organization.
Personal growth because you will be able to use feature like branch policies, CICD pipelines or an integrated work item board.
Peace of mind because that network share is less likely to be recoverable than a self hosted gitlab instance for example.
The migration process also only take less than 5 min so there are more advabtages than disadvantages to do so.
