sean's place

Crashing Source Control

Here at Pelco, we use a not-to-be-named source control product. During the normal course of development, I decided to create a branch on a freshly imported source tree. I pressed “OK” to kick off the branch creation, and our source control server promptly died. Here’s a little snippet of the discussion I had with my boss about it:

Sean: I killed the (insert name of source control) server.
Manager: (matter-of-factly) Oh. Ok. (he now logins into server to restart source control)
Sean: Yep, it seems that branching is quite the fatal operation.

Manager: Why’d ya do that? It’s not as if it’s a use case of the product or anything, like that. Silly user.
It turns out that the product just sucks. Branching is a major selling point for it, and the reason we spent a lot of money (tens of thousands) on it. Nevermind that when you actually try to use the feature, the server crashes.