Teaching people the basic mechanics of git is easy. Convincing them that it’s worth the effort is hard.

My current workplace uses CVS (still!) and there’s an initiative by a couple of developers to migrate people from CVS to Mercurial. It’s not git, but the fact that it’s a DVCS is still a pretty good advance. We’re currently going through a setup phase where people are testing the waters on a sandbox server with hg installed and it seems like the full jump may actually happen before I leave for school.

And as nicely as this story is going, it was rather difficult to get to this point: the meeting leading up to the decision for a sandbox trial took hours.

That was a real eye-opener; I swallowed git down for a college course and took a lot of its features for granted. It’s much different watching people trying to shake off a CVS mentality and cope with a new version control paradigm. I had it much easier. Continue reading →