| ▲ | Dylan16807 3 days ago |
| If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important? |
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| ▲ | bryant 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important? Oh boy. Tons of apps in maintenance mode run critical infrastructure and see few commits in a year. |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 3 days ago | parent [-] | | And the people using it multiple times a year delete it afterwards? | | |
| ▲ | RealStickman_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | relying on random local copies as a backup strategy is not a strategy. | | | |
| ▲ | shakna 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They often only have a binary that you would have to reverse engineer. Source code gets lost. To step outside just utility programs, the reason why Command & Conquer didn't have a remaster was: > I'm not going to get into this conversation, but I feel this needs to be answered. During this project of getting the games on Steam, no source code from any legacy games showed up in the archives. | |
| ▲ | bryant 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And the people using it multiple times a year delete it afterwards? The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might. What you're leaning into is a high-risk backup strategy that would rely mostly on luck to get something remotely close to the current version back online. It's pretty reckless. | | |
| ▲ | darkwater a day ago | parent [-] | | > The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might. In environments that go so far (deleting local checkouts of code out of security concerns), I bet they do have a mirror/copy of the version controlled code. |
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| ▲ | Lammy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | More like “none of the people who worked on it are at the company any more” |
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| ▲ | NewJazz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Devs clean up their workstation sometimes. You can get fancy about deleting build artifacts or just remove the whole directory. Devs move to new machines sometimes and don't always transfer everything. Devs leave. Software still runs, and if you don't have the source then you'll only have the binary or other build artifact. |
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| ▲ | burnt-resistor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Popularity != importance. There is plenty of absolutely critical FOSS code that receives very little maintenance and attention, yet is mission critical to society functioning efficiently. And the same happens in organizations too, with say their bootloader for firmware of hardware products. |
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| ▲ | OutOfHere 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You clearly haven't worked much with code over many years. When laptops change, not all existing projects get checked out. In fact, in VSCode, one can use a project without cloning and checking it out at all. |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Honestly I'm just really wondering what the odds are. In particular for code that made it onto git. | | |
| ▲ | OutOfHere 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Over the long term, the odds reach 100% that it won't be checked out. That's because people mostly only work on newer projects. As for mature older projects, even if they're running in production, cease to see many/any updates, and so they don't get cloned on to newer laptops. This doesn't mean that the older projects are now less important, because if they ever need to be re-deployed to production, only the source code will allow it. |
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