Re: Best practices for working with GIT

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 10:55 AM David Gibbs via MIDRANGE-L
<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 7:47 AM Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Maybe source control but there is a whole lot more to version control than
just maintaining GIT branches.

Especially in the IBM i space.

There's compilation, dependency management, deployment, auditing, etc.

All those things are important for mainstream platforms as well.
Honestly, the main difference I see between IBM i and other platforms,
from a change management perspective, is how source is typically
stored (i.e. as members in source physical files instead of as stream
files, which every mainstream platform just calls "files").

While the *needs and concerns* are similar for all platforms, the
solutions tend to look very different, largely due to historical and
cultural factors. The traditional IBM i way is to have a vendor
provide a comprehensive (and expensive) package to handle as many
aspects of change management as possible. The "Unixy" and open-source
way is to have several independent but interoperable packages, each of
which handles a separate concern. Git happens to be the dominant
package for what it does, but it wasn't designed or intended to be the
whole change management solution. There are other packages which
handle the other concerns David mentioned.

John Y.