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SCCS roach motel

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Re: SCCS roach motel

#3

Post by e40 »

For those that don't know, Larry was the author of BitKeeper and when he changed the license for it, it prompted Linus to write Git. Guessing if he had never done that, we'd all be using BitKeeper now and Git wouldn't exist.

Re: SCCS roach motel

#4

Post by linsomniac »

I once had one of my users come to me: "I accidentally typed "ci filename" rather than "vi filename", it asked me some questions and I answered them, and now my file is gone." I told her: "Don't worry, I know exactly what happened and how to fix it!" She was one of that day's Lucky 10,000.

Re: SCCS roach motel

#6

Post by kjs3 »

e40 wrote: post #3

For those that don't know, Larry was the author of BitKeeper and when he changed the license for it, it prompted Linus to write Git. Guessing if he had never done that, we'd all be using BitKeeper now and Git wouldn't exist.

And Marc Rochkind (the OP) wrote SCCS, as well as one of the more seminal Unix programming books and a ton of other notable achievements.

Looking through the rest of the archive, nice to see that Larry has gone into retirement but makes time away from fishing to continue to tell us how fucking smart he is and how stupid everyone else is. Never change, Larry.

Re: SCCS roach motel

#7

Post by kjs3 »

linsomniac wrote: post #4

I once had one of my users come to me: "I accidentally typed "ci filename" rather than "vi filename", it asked me some questions and I answered them, and now my file is gone." I told her: "Don't worry, I know exactly what happened and how to fix it!" She was one of that day's Lucky 10,000.

I, when a young lad, did the same thing. Many of us did.

Re: SCCS roach motel

#8

Post by maxbond »

e40 wrote: post #3

For those that don't know, Larry was the author of BitKeeper and when he changed the license for it, it prompted Linus to write Git. Guessing if he had never done that, we'd all be using BitKeeper now and Git wouldn't exist.

It was also the impetus for the lesser known SCMs Mercurial and Fossil.

Re: SCCS roach motel

#9

Post by fanf2 »

I got into unix after CVS had pretty much displaced SCCS and RCS, but the older per-file version control systems persisted long enough that I had a few close encounters with them.

When I took over Cambridge University’s DNS, its code and configuration was still in SCCS, because that was what shipped with SunOS in 1991ish. I converted the SCCS archive via RCS and CVS to git – https://dotat.at/@/2014-11-27-uplift-from-sccs-to-git.html – which was a fairly entertaining exercise. (Sadly the links in that blog post are mostly broken.) I even used those conversion scripts more than once! https://dotat.at/@/2016-07-19-uplift-from-sccs-to-git-again.... (That repository ended up with at least three distinct root commits, one for the main DNS history, one for the Ansible setup that started with DHCP and later grew to handle DNS too, and later the separate vanity domain DNS setup.)

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