Checking in of “commented out” code [closed]

Answer 1

There is clearly a tension between 1) checking in early, and 2) always maintaining the repository in a working state. If you have more than a few developers, the latter is going to take increasing precedence, because you can't have one developer crapping all over everyone else for his own personal workflow. That said, you shouldn't underestimate the value of the first guideline. Developers use all different kinds of mental fenceposts, and individualized workflows are one way that great developers squeeze out those extra Xs. As a manager your job not to try to understand all these nuances—which you will fail at unless you are a genius and all your developers are idiots—but rather enable your developers to be the best they can be through their own decision-making.

You mention in the comment that you don't use private branches. My question for you is why not? Okay, I don't know anything about TFS, so maybe there are good reasons. However after using git for a year, I've gotta say that a good DVCS totally diffuses this tension. There are cases where I find commenting out code to be useful as I'm building a replacement, but I will lose sleep over it if I'm inflicting it on others. Being able to branch locally means I can keep meaningful commits for my individual process without having to worry about (or even notify) downstream developers of temporary messes.

Answer 2

I think never is too strong a condition.

I tend to comment out, checkin, run the tests, have a think and then remove comments after the next release.

Answer 3

I broadly agree with the principle that commented out code shouldn't be checked in. The source control system is a shared resource, and your colleague is, to an extent, using it as his personal scratch pad. This isn't very considerate to the other users, especially if you subscribe to the idea of shared ownership of the codebase.

The next developer to see that commented-out code would have no idea that it's a work in progress. Is he free to change it? Is it dead code? He doesn't know.

If your colleague's change isn't in a state where it can be checked in, he needs to finish it, and/or learn to make smaller, incremental changes.

"Checking in partial changes that may or may not be deployed" - presumably that also means may or may not be tested? That's a slippery slope to a very ropey code base.

Answer 4

Just echoing the chorus. Discourage this at all costs. It makes the code harder to read and leaves folks wondering whats good/bad about that code that isnt even part the application at the present time. You can always find changes by comparing revisions. If there was some major surgery and code was commented out en-masse the dev should have noted it in the revision notes on checkin/merge.

incomplete/experimental code should be in a branch to be developed to completion. the head/trunk should be the mainline that always compiles and is whats shipping. once the experimental branch is complete it/accepted it should be merged into the head/mainline. There is even an IEEE standard (IEEE 1042) describing this if you need support documentation.

Answer 5

If the developer has commented out some code because it is not yet complete, then the correct "source control" way to deal with this would be for that developer to keep it in a separate branch of his own, until that code is ready to check in.

With a DVCS (like git, bazaar, or mercurial) this is dead easy as it requires no changes in the central repository. Otherwise, perhaps you could talk about giving developers their own branches on the server if they are working on specific features that will take them a long enough time (ie, days).

There is nothing wrong with checking in commented out code in some situations, it's just that this is one situation where there may be a better way to do it, so the developer can track changes to his source even though it isn't ready to be checked in to the main repository.

Answer 6

My view: if developers are working on their own branches, or in their own sandbox area, then they should be able to check in whatever they want. It's when they check code into a shared branch (a feature branch, or a team's branch, or of course MAIN/trunk) that the code should be as pristine as possible (no commented out code, no more FIXMEs, etc).