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Re: coaxing scientists to use cvs
From: |
LEE Sau Dan |
Subject: |
Re: coaxing scientists to use cvs |
Date: |
09 Jul 2004 23:27:04 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 |
>>>>> "Kaz" == Kaz Kylheku <address@hidden> writes:
Kaz> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Hensley, Jeffrey L ERDC-ITL-MS Contractor
Kaz> wrote:
>> I've been working together with a group of about 6
>> engineers/scientists for over a year. These are all bright
>> people, but software engineering is not one of their strong
>> suits.
That's the problem. They usually won't care anything about software
engineering, whatever valid reasons you're selling them. They simply
can't understand the concept, and how useful it is. I write academic
papers with LaTeX, and find CVS invaluable in keeping track of the
variants, esp. the "milestone" revisions submitted to a
journal/conference and the final camera-ready versions. Being able to
diff between these milestones is so useful. Having a full history of
the revisions also means that I can now delete text by really deleting
them, rather than keeping a shadow there by only commenting them out
(making the source files much longer and polluted with obsolete
things).
I've been trying to persuade my supervisor to use some version control
system for the scientific writings with me. The response is always
that he's too busy (lazy) to learn new things. Even when he knows
that this is a useful tool, he still refuses to learn it. (Don't ask
me why. I can't understand that attitude either.) Then, I asked him
to cooperate and ask me for my latest version (which I keep myself
with CVS) before he starts editing, and send me his new version when
he's done with the editing. He never listened. He just go one with
HIS old version and start writing and adding things to it, ignoring
what I've added in between. I have to do a tedious and boring merge
afterwards when he sends me back his version. Given his uncooperative
attitude w.r.t. version controlling, that's the best I can do. What's
worse: his LaTeX editor tends to reformat the paragraphs he's editing,
making the diff result with my CVS sources bloated with bogus lines,
taking me more time to do the merge (even with the handy ediff-merge
function of Emacs). I've explained these problems to him. Guess
what. He said his time is so valuable that he'd leave all these
time-consuming things to me. Translation: you cheap labour do
everything in the tedious way; I'm not going to do anything to make
the task easier for you (even when it is just a tiny bit extra work
for me).
How does he do version control himself? He simply does it the old
stupid way: cp -r trunk/ some_version/ His home directory is thus full
of stuffs. He has the luxury: when disk space runs out, the admin
people buy new disks and install and configure the new disk space for
him.
>> I managed to convince them to start using CVS to try to help
>> maintain the scientific package that they are developing.
Good luck.
Kaz> I say, just leave them alone to do whatever they want. Their
Kaz> success is in their own hands. Just don't tie your own
Kaz> success to theirs, that's all.
Yeah! Don't expect anything on them. If they can do the version
control properly, it should be treated as a bonus, not an expectation.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 address@hidden
E-mail: address@hidden
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee