I worked for a client years ago, Dropbox was source control. It wasn't as bad as...

OJFord · on July 12, 2017

Were the (technical) employees happy about it?

I.e. was it just a crazy requirement handed down, or did they not know better?

I just can't imagine it even for solo development, nevermind collaborative work! "Agh. We must have had a merge conflict, damn, the core part of my work is gone... Let me see if I have a recent copy... Oop, no, I don't, because I've run out of disk space from all these clone backups."

gradys · on July 12, 2017

FWIW, I use git inside Dropbox for my personal solo projects. I don't want to have to use commits and git's remote syncing mechanisms to share in-progress code between my desktop at home and my laptop. I want to be able to pick up exactly where I was on the other machine, including my git staging area and local unstaged changes. It works perfectly for this.

I do occasionally get Dropbox-level merge conflicts for tmp editor/IDE files, but I can't recall getting any for source files.

girvo · on July 13, 2017

So, neat trick: "git clone" your local Dropbox copy somewhere, and you get the benefits of "commit" and "push", but it's local; and then your remote is synced via Dropbox :)

OJFord · on July 14, 2017

> neat trick: ... and you get the benefits of "commit" and "push"

GP seems to be deliberately avoiding commands relating to remote management, such as push.

fgonzag · on July 13, 2017

I use a similar setup. I use spideroak hive since its 'zero knowledge', I don't however sync any binary or IDE directories. This allows me to have the source files and git repos synced, but still keep somewhat independent set ups.

weaksauce · on July 14, 2017

just so you know, git on dropbox is not a great idea in a team. solo it should be fine but you are probably better off using bitbucket for free.

jermaustin1 · on July 14, 2017

All projects were single developer. It was a burn and churn environment. Contractors from all over the world, share a folder from the root, they work in it, when they completed it, the folder was unshared and they were paid.

It worked OK for that purpose. And I still have dropbox mainly for that reason. My source code is always local. Everything goes into TFS, but the local is backed up to dropbox.