[TUHS] SCCS roach motel

[Rob Pike]

To answer your actual question, it is of course a riff on a TV ad for a
cockroach trap in the 1980s. The sentiment of the quote, as I saw it (it's
possible I was the one who added it to the fortunes file after ken saw the
SCCS burble at the top of some file from USG and laughed), was primarily a
reaction to the taint it added to the previously annotation-free top of the
file. It was also a response to the march of corporate code management
stepping into the research world, or perhaps the hacker world. It's a
philosophical thing, a feeling, not an argument.

It all seems so quaint now.

-rob


On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 8:22 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> According to the Unix room fortunes file, the actual quote is
>
> SCCS: the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out.
> Ken Thompson
>
> On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 3:52 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering has asked me to write a
>> retrospective on the influence of SCCS over the last 50 years, as my SCCS
>> paper was published in 1975. They consider it one of the most influential
>> papers from TSE's first decade.
>>
>> There's a funny quote from Ken Thompson that circulates from time-to-time:
>>
>> "SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!"
>>
>> But nobody seems to know what it means exactly. As part of my research, I
>> asked Ken what the quote meant, sunce I wanted to include it. He explained
>> that it refers to SCCS storing binary data in its repository file,
>> preventing UNIX text tools from operating on the file.
>>
>> Of course, this is only one of SCCS's many weaknesses. If you have
>> anything funny about any of the others, post it here. I already have all
>> the boring usual stuff (e.g., long-term locks, file-oriented, no merging).
>>
>> Marc Rochkind
>> mrochkind.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20241214/8f045c9b/attachment.htm>