[TUHS] SCCS

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sat Sep 14 07:51:27 AEST 2019


On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 05:37:12PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> The actual basis for that opinion (and it's just my opinion but it's
> not pulled out of hyperspace) is that the older systems think only
> about one file at a time, not collections of files.  

Yep.  That's the problem that BitKeeper solved first, correctly, with
atomic commits, full rename tracking, etc.  If you googled "changeset"
back in 1996 before BitKeeper started happening there were 6 hits
(mostly for a really weird system called Aide De Camp).

If you googled it 5 years later there were millions of hits, almost
100% BitKeeper related.

One of the selling points of BK back in the day was "remember when you
forgot to tag the tree in CVS and you couldn't get back to where you
wanted to be?  Yeah, every commit in BK is a tag, you can roll back
to anywhere."

So I agree with you Norm that exact problem was part of why BitKeeper
was invented.  When I was going on about SCCS, I was admiring the weave,
it's a neat way to do things.  But I wouldn't suggest anyone use just
SCCS today, that's nuts.


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