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Large Scale Legacy Powerbuilder with GIT or?

Asked 2011-06-08T18:03:32.197
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I am evaluating various version/source control options for our legacy Powerbuilder application (in PB11 now, will be migrating to legacy 12 soon). To this point, all the version control with very limited source control has been done in-house where the code can be changed by numerous traveling consultants, but the changes tend to be pushed into the base by certain module code owners. This workflow was okay for a while when the company was small, but as we grew, it became more and more challenging. It is a very large application. I'll give you the numbers just to get an idea of the scale we are talking about. Up to 40 PBLS with hundreds of objects in each. About 500MB of code. About 100 consultants constantly on the road, any of them may be making base changes, which are then turned over to code owners.

So after reading about and evaluating various options, I was really excited about Distributed Version Control Systems. I was even more excited when I found that there is actually a proxy GITSCC, made by PushOk to get Powerbuilder to work with GIT. When I tried it out with a small application, I was pleasantly surprised that it worked and worked relatively well, except for some quirks. However what was interesting/disturbing is that I can't find a single post on the net of anybody talking about using GITSCC with Powerbuilder. Even the PushOK's GITSCC forum had only one post (non-Powerbuilder specific) until I created two more. However, once I put our main application under GIT using GITSCC, I noticed major performance issues updating PBL statuses.

So now a couple of questions, which I hope someone can help me with:

  1. Is there anybody who successfully uses GIT with Powerbuilder. If so, what's your workflow?

  2. When I refresh PBL statuses I noticed that there are two operations, which are very time consuming:

    • The log will say "Retrieving extended status information for the files

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I have used Git to manage so many different technologies and documents. You should have no issues.

Ensure that people are pushing often and fetching often. This will make sure that objects are distributed frequently so when you want to do an intense operation, you won't first have to wait for a gigantic fetch to finish.

Stick with Git over Mercurial. This may be seen as an opinion but I'm not convinced that anything out there will give you more flexibility and options than git.

I would highly recommend jumping in on the #git irc channel as well. There's lots of helpful people there always.

Hope this helps.

answered 2011-06-08T18:15:21.657

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