Enforcing the Use of GitHub?

So, I’m reaching out for polite suggestions on an ongoing issue at my “work”. I’m currently an Undergraduate student – seeking Master’s – and I work with many other Graduate students on this relatively large research project.

The problem lies in getting some cooperation from others. I’ve used GitHub for almost five years, across every platform out there. I know quite a bit about its ins and outs, and I’ve come to rely on version control and commit history. The thing is – all of our coworkers, though one in specific (the one who happens to be doing a lot of the work right now, though I did lay down the backbone of the code that he’s working on) practically refuse to use it.

This one individual has adopted what I call an “unplanned repository”. He has several (approximately 8) folders of our repository he downloaded straight from GitHub, unzipped, and began working on. He hasn’t used GitHub at all on these folders, and at this point he’s keeping them all as separate “versions” with names that only he could distinguish from one another (stuff such as “(repo name)-REC-ONE”, “(repo name)-WITH-HTTP”, etc.).

I’ve politely (and recently, not so politely but in a joking manner) told him that he should really consider using the GitHub repository I took so much time in preparing with separate branches for our varying “working stages”. His most recent excuse was “well, last time we did that you started working on my branch”, which while true, it was after one line of code and then I immediately noticed and changed branches, discarding all changes and making no changes to his branch.

So, my question is: how would you suggest I practically force him to use it? It’s becoming literally unbearable, and other professionals in the field have already pointed out to us that our “version control” is negligent, which I totally agree though it’s not my fault. The hardest thing is that everyone has been at this work for longer than I have, but I’ve also somewhat been put in main control of this project, so I don’t want to overstep my bounds or burn any bridges, but this just has to stop. Any suggestions? Do we just have to wait for something catastrophic to happen to convince him to use version control?

原文链接：Enforcing the Use of GitHub?