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A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

spinellis.gr

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Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#11

Post by jmclnx »

keybored wrote: post #8
phplovesong wrote: post #3

670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push straight to master in most cases?

What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.

IN 1995, I think there were some proprietary offerings, one company in Massachusetts was purchased by IBM back then.

But on the minis (non-DEC) I worked on back then, there was nothing. We kept a specific drive that had source current source, but once in production you just copied the change version to that drive, replacing what was already there. As you can guess, changes disappeared often :) And there was no change history, but we would tag each line changed with our 3 character ID.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#12

Post by DSpinellis »

lionkor wrote: post #6
mprovost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything looks like a new revision.

also rebases instead of merges wouldn't count as merges

I don't think the concept of a rebase existed before Bitbucker and Git.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#14

Post by kps »

keybored wrote: post #8
phplovesong wrote: post #3

670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push straight to master in most cases?

What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.

A stack of labelled backup tapes.

Whereas today, we have a stack of virtual backup tapes plus a DAG on the labels.

(OK, only 30 years ago we were using SCCS or maybe already RCS.)

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#16

Post by whynotmaybe »

keybored wrote: post #8
phplovesong wrote: post #3

670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push straight to master in most cases?

What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.

Don't know about 30 years ago but 25 years ago in a small shop, the code was on a network share, on the production server.

And whenever a code file was locked on the server, the Devs went into the server room (aka the break room with a computer) and rebooted the server. The production server that was used by 30+ employees.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#17

Post by zvr »

DSpinellis wrote: post #5

I published an updated extension of this post's linked article in Empirical Software Engineering. You can read it without a paywall at https://rdcu.be/b7FzE . You may also be interested to see the actual GitHub repository at https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo .

Right. The title of this submission should have a "(2015)".

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#18

Post by jlokier »

phplovesong wrote: post #3

670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push straight to master in most cases?

If the original develoeprs had used Git, they'd be mostly fast-forward merges. Those are the default merge operation in Git, and they don't appear as merge commits in a repo.

However, there commits start 33 years before Git was created. Merge commits were not even a concept back than.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#19

Post by DSpinellis »

aap_ wrote: post #15

Hopefully UNIX v4 will soon be in there too :)

Indeed! The repo includes some v4 elements: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Researc...

The provided kernel predates the actual edition by a few months. It is based on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v..., which matches V4 more than V3.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#20

Post by leoc »

DSpinellis wrote: post #9
keybored wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did source control look like 30 years ago? Was merges used a lot? I have only used Subversion and Git.

30 years ago (1995) open source offerings: mostly CVS for large projects and RCS for smaller ones. On the proprietary side, the aged SCCS was available and used, while Perforce and Microsoft Visual Source Safe were being launched.

(Meanwhile, apparently MS itself continued using SLM, the in-house source-control system which had been commercialised as MS Delta, internally until about 2000. https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftDelta https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97... https://ricomariani.medium.com/super-brief-notes-on-early-so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255526 )
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