History of version control - 10 astonishments

Post by mikeash » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #3

_delirium wrote: post #2

Some version of #2 might actually not be a horrible idea; companies seem fairly adept at losing old source code, and physical archives run by competent librarians are a little bit more durable and organized. Reminds me of a recent story from engineering ( http://wrttn.in/04af1a ), but there are plenty in tech as well, where e.g. someone resorts to emailing a former contractor asking if they have a copy of the source…

I can relate to your link, since I now have a number of hard-drives with a ton of stuff on them that has been copied back and forth and mixed up so many times I am not quite sure what is what and which directories are complete (I have a small suspicion that none of them are). I can't imagine how a large company can possibly figure this out. But your solution isn't going to help much. In twenty years, do we even have…

Post by xer0 » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 4:16 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #11

tomjen3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate to your link, since I now have a number of hard-drives with a ton of stuff on them that has been copied back and forth and mixed up so many times I am not quite sure what is what and which directories are complete (I have a small suspicion that none of them are). I can't imagine how a large company can possibly figure this out. But your solution isn't going to help much. In twenty years, do we even have…

If you have a dedicated archive with dedicated librarians managing it, they can be in charge of migrating the archived data forward whenever a particular storage technology threatens to become obsolete.

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #8

tonfa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monotone gave most inspiration according to the authors of git and hg. But the author addresses the point anyway: > I’m not recording the first time anyone made the astonishing thing, but the first time it was productised and became popular.

Torvalds was expressly trying to replace bitkeeper when he wrote git. And I'm not sure anything he said about other systems might be considered "inspiration". But that said, git really isn't very similar to bitkeeper except insofar as it enables distributed development. Both model development as a forest of independent developer trees which communicate with each other through merges. But bitkeeper is still a traditio…

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 4:46 PM UTC

Create wrote: post #12

rst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives very short shrift to commercial source control systems generally. Two (VSS, and SCCS --- the latter part of the original AT&T Unix distributions, on the same closed-source terms) get mentioned in passing, but neither gets treated as a milestone. That would include BitKeeper --- copies were available for a few years at no cost to Linux kernel developers, but only on increasingly restrictive terms, which McVoy…

Misses also GOOG's dearly Perforce.

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 4:49 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #16

rst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives very short shrift to commercial source control systems generally. Two (VSS, and SCCS --- the latter part of the original AT&T Unix distributions, on the same closed-source terms) get mentioned in passing, but neither gets treated as a milestone. That would include BitKeeper --- copies were available for a few years at no cost to Linux kernel developers, but only on increasingly restrictive terms, which McVoy…

Misses the absolutely massive Clearcase. In 1999, (and earlier, but I ran into in 1999 at Loudcloud) - if you wanted to support multiple branches and allow merging code into them, it was the only tool that made it easy. Had great (windows) client side environment that gave everyone a "view" into the source, But _man_ was the backend ugly.