One large company that shall remain nameless runs a 4-year old version of Git, TortoiseGit, and a lot of other tools, and can’t upgrade.
Being a large company, it can’t just let every developer install the newest version of whatever they please. That would be just wrong, wouldn’t it? They have an infrastructure group that is supposed to “onboard” external products and make them “kosher”.
However, just rubber-stamping someone else’s work is boring. The infrastructure group are smart creative people, so they decided… to modify Git a little.
Since the large company acts like a software black hole – code can come in, but it cannot come out – the customizations did not make it back to public Git. The world moved forward creating new versions of tools that are not compatible with those private customizations.
Apparently, the infrastructure group cannot, or does not want to keep up with that flow of changes, so they are stuck in 2013, and the whole company is stuck with them. Huzzah!
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We recently had to develop a small c++ program for customer. It turned out they run Windows XP that was never updated. No .net on the computer. It was fun to create it in Visual Studio 2017.
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I can imagine 🙂 To be fair, the large company is not completely irresponsible: they do move forward, but only slowly and/or when absolutely necessary. E.g. they stopped using Windows XP when it approached the end of extended support. Now they are on Windows 7 🙂