Obsoleting Your Codebase

William sure has a knack for saying the wrong thing, leading to lots of wasted time.

His team had been using our repository to check in their example code. Our repository’s purpose is example code, so it fits nicely in there in my opinion.

He comes over to my desk and claims that developers will wonder where they need to go to find the example code, so he wants them to go to a new repository he has just created.

How are people going to find his repository if they somehow can’t find our repository?

Well, his idea is that his repository will also deploy a website with instructions on.

How are people going to find his website?

Well, he hasn’t thought of that point. He also stated that when he moves the code to the new repository, it will make our codebase “obsolete”.

I was really annoyed by this. Firstly, if you create a new repository and move all the code from an existing repository, all you have essentially done is renamed the repository (and wasted a lot of time). Secondly, why does he think his repository is more important than ours? Surely it should be agreed with the team, rather than just pulling rank and forcing his ludicrous ideas through.

I firmly put my point across and then he replies:

“I’m not making your codebase obsolete, I’m just moving my code out of it. None of your code is going anywhere”.

WHY DIDN’T HE JUST SAY THAT THEN!?

I still think it is dumb creating another repository, because now there will be two repositories to check for example code, and all the example code is currently in the same location. If a website is actually helpful, then it can be added to our repository.