A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#1

Post by lioeters » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:32 AM UTC

A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution
spinellis.gr

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#2

Post by werdl » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 10:46 AM UTC

Interesting to see the decisions they took regarding which flavours they chose to include.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#3

Post by phplovesong » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

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

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#4

Post by mprovost » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #3

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

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

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#5

Post by DSpinellis » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

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.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#6

Post by lionkor » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 12:16 PM UTC

mprovost wrote: post #4

phplovesong wrote: post #3

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

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

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#7

Post by tony-john12 » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 12:59 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#8

Post by keybored » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

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.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#9

Post by DSpinellis » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

#10

Post by jmclnx » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

mprovost wrote: post #4

phplovesong wrote: post #3

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

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

Correct. I had used both at work up until around 2005. The idiot large companies I worked at did not believe in Source Code Control. That is the one thing I liked about RCS/SCCS, once I checked out an item, no one could check in their changes unless they contacted me. Forcing a coordinated manual merge between us.

I tried to get our org on to something for a while, but got massive push back until 5 or 6 years ago when they setup corporate wide paid githup repo.

Before that, I found a small group of developers around 2005 that used CVS and they allowed me to leverage that for my group. But of course I was the only one who used it.

Back then I guess people loved loosing source code, which happened a lot until git.