CITCON Paris 2009
As mentioned Daniel and I both attended CITCON Paris the weekend before last. I’ve not had a chance to post a follow up yet as we also took the opportunity to eat the legs off every duck in France (well, we tried).
Firstly a huge thanks to PJ, Jeff, Eric and all the other volunteers for another great conference. Thanks again to Eric and Guillaume for acting as local guides on Saturday night. As always, the open spaces format and mix of attendees delivered a great day. It was also great to see a few familiar faces from the year before in Amsterdam (and a familiar shirt thanks to Ivan ? ).
This year I proposed and facilitated a single topic: Distributed SCM in the Corporate World. I finally added a full write-up on the conference wiki earlier in the week for those who are interested. For the impatient, here are my take-aways from the session:
- Of the distributed SCMs, there is not much traction in the corporate world just yet, although git appears to have gained a foothold. (Obviously our sample size is small, but I also expect CITCON attendees to be closer to the edge than the average team.)
- Where distributed SCMs are used, the topology is still like the centralised model. However, the ability to easily clone and move changes between repositories presents opportunities to work around issues like painful networks (contrast this to special proxy servers which are needed in similar scenarios with centralised SCMs).
- The people using git liked it primarily for its more flexible workflow and better merging. It’s conceivable to have this in the centralised model too, but no single centralised contender was mentioned.
- So far the use of distributed SCMs didn’t seem to have practical implications for CI – probably due to the use of a centralised topology.
Looks like we’re still waiting to see more creative use of distributed SCMs in corporate projects – perhaps it is something worth revisiting in future conferences. I hope to post on some of the other sessions I attended at a later date.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 4:39 am and is filed under Agile, Continuous Integration, Technology, Testing, Zutubi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 14th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Hi Jason,
I wasn’t in your session but looking at your notes I didn’t see one point that always seems to come up when I talk with people about distributed SCMs: it seems to encourage deferred integration.
The ability to branch easily means that people branch often. And even if it is easier to merge than a traditional SCM the merging doesn’t seem to keep pace.
I don’t base this on any practical experience, but the default behavior for git seems be the kind of thing that people complain about when it is done in ClearCase, only somehow now it is cool.
I don’t particularly have anything against git or other distributed SCMs but they seem quite the fad at the moment and all the hype makes me itch.
Jtf
October 15th, 2009 at 2:22 am
Hi Jeff,
There is a brief mention of something similar to this in the “Local Commits” section (not branching more, but integrating less frequently as you can commit locally). One of the non-git users posed this as a potential issue, but the git users did not think this happened in their projects. My presumption is this is because they have the “CI attitude”.
I do agree that distributed SCMs are overhyped at the moment. Actually I think git/Mercurial and others do have some nice features – potentially worth switching for – but most if not all of these features could be implemented in a “centralised” SCM too. The distributed bit itself is not so critical when you want a centralised topology anyway! This is why I’m quite interested to find out how to take more advantage of a distributed topology — but nobody outside of open source projects (which tend to have different management structures) seems to be doing it.