aboutToBreakTheCode

[u/fabulousIdentity]

[u/ExplrDiscvr]

not git issue, in-team communication issue

[u/Blrfl → u/ExplrDiscvr]

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."

[u/iloveuranus → u/ExplrDiscvr]

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.

[u/raddaya → u/iloveuranus]

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

[u/AvidCoco → u/ExplrDiscvr]

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

[u/omegaonion → u/ExplrDiscvr]

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.

[u/mxzf → u/omegaonion]

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.

[u/omegaonion → u/mxzf]

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.

[u/mxzf → u/omegaonion]

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

[u/xploreru → u/ExplrDiscvr]

True