History of version control - 10 astonishments
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History of version control - 10 astonishments
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Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#2Some 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 code they wrote on their contract job three years ago, because the company has somehow lost it.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#3Some 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 a computer that is capable of reading the old floppy disks? Most computers these days don't come with a floppy drive and the new mac mini doesn't even have a CD drive. Sure USB may be around, but twenty years ago you would have said the same thing about the 3.5inch floppy.
Really if you want to store source code like that, you would have to print it physical paper and store it in a massive archive. And how would you handle changes?
Do you want to print everything each time you do a svn commit? Or just the diff (yeah, that is going to be fun to type in)?
A central server, properly organized and upgraded would properly be the best, but even so it is never going to be very good. In a world were the price of data is very close to nothing, good metadata seems increasingly expensive.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#4Some 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…
Love that story! Thanks for linking to it.
Just as hard with software, whatever version control system is used...
Who is going to remember the culture of old-but-still-running Ruby on Rails apps in 30 years time, when even Node.js isn't fashionable any more ;)
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#5It misses out BitKeeper, which inspired both Git and Mercurial, which was launched 5 years earlier.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#6It misses out BitKeeper, which inspired both Git and Mercurial, which was launched 5 years earlier.
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.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#7I would say it's missing 7.5, 1996 public anonymous cvs. Before that, you were either one of the developers with a login or you waited until a source tarball was released. Which makes it really hard for outsiders to contribute because they're aiming for a moving target they can't see.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#8It misses out BitKeeper, which inspired both Git and Mercurial, which was launched 5 years earlier.
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 traditional centralized server keeping a bunch of delta'd files.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#9I would say it's missing 7.5, 1996 public anonymous cvs. Before that, you were either one of the developers with a login or you waited until a source tarball was released. Which makes it really hard for outsiders to contribute because they're aiming for a moving target they can't see.
Yes, absolutely. CVS, for all its faults, changed the way we think about source control. It became a public record, not just a tool. And what's funny is I don't think any of us realized it at the time; we were all too hung up over how weird lockless modification was and learning to do merge failure resolution.
Re: History of version control - 10 astonishments
#10It misses out BitKeeper, which inspired both Git and Mercurial, which was launched 5 years earlier.
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 ultimately wound up revoking altogether. IIRC, Linus released the first embryonic version of git within weeks after McVoy withdrew the free-as-in-beer version of BitKeeper.