Seriously. Apparently I'm not the first person in the world to notice that version control is a problem. Who knew?
I talked with some friends online yesterday and things turned to my griping about that problem at my job and someone mentioned that there's actually quite a lot of stuff like that already out there. In July I patted myself on the back for having that idea. Now that I actually look it up, apparently some kinds of have been around for over 10 years. This is what happens when English majors pontificate about tech issues without deliberate research.
This morning I talked to M., the economist on the doomed project about it. I think one big problem is that people here, if you'll forgive the oversimplification, are dumb. However, he explained that there are a number of other reasons as well. For one thing, the federal government contracts out tech support on five-year contracts. If they didn't think to ask for revision control software when the last contract was signed, they might not be able to get it until the next one. For another, there are all kinds of security issues, since some people here work on classified stuff sometimes. That slows down approval of software updates greatly. You and I might say that open-source software is generally more secure than Microsoft products that haven't got the last couple security patches yet, but apparently the people who matter think differently.
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