[TUHS] Claim your early Unix contributions on GitHub

[Joerg Schilling]

Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:

> On 30/03/2016 15:31, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > Given that using git enforces a loss of meta data, is there a chance to get
> > the SCCS history for older UNIX versions?
>
> I've tried to incorporate the SCCS meta data in the Git commits.  Where 
> that was not possible I added a header-like line in the Git commit message.
>
> The BSD CSRG SCCS data are available on the four CD set compiled by 
> Marshall Kirk McKusick https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/.
>
> I don't know of any other SCCS data openly available.  If anyone has 
> such data, I'd appreciate a copy.

I know of no other SCCS data, but let me make a remark that results from a 
recent discussion with Kirk Mckusick:

Kirk told me that the regents of UCB do not like the unmodified (original) SCCS 
history data to be published unless this is done with a written permission.
Currently only Kirk owns such a permission.

Kirk did however aks whether the GIT repo from CSRG would be OK as it contains 
hand made fixes for a disk crash and as it does not use the original meta data.
The result was that there is no problem with a different archive format.

Given that the recent (upcomming **) SCCS history format (SCCSv6) is not the 
original SCCSv4 format that was used in CSRG, it seems that using the hand 
crafted fixed and a conversion to SCCSv6 would be OK as well.

The advantage with the SCCSv6 history format is that you are able to convert it 
back to the SCCSv4 history format via:

	sccs -R cvt -d -V4 .

;-)

I am planning a SCCSv6 variant of the CSRG archives, but I need to manually fix 
the broken history files first. Note that this now may be a bit easier because

	sccs -R val -T

gives better warnings since a few years than the historic sccs did.


Note that a full SCCS history may be very helpful. Last year, I came up with 
some problems in the Bourne Shell and a SCCS history with delta comments from 
around 1983 would have been very helpful to understand some changes that 
introduced bugs.

I also recently was interested in knowing when waitpid() was introduced.

**) upcomming because support for project based commits and network support is 
not yet ready in sccs.

See http://sccs.sourceforge.net/man/sccsfile.4.html for a description of the 
SCCSv6 history format.

Jörg

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