[TUHS] SCCS, TeamWare, BitKeeper, and Git

Marc Rochkind mrochkind at gmail.com
Sun Dec 15 03:43:47 AEST 2024


As I mentioned in another post, I'm writing an invited paper for an
upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering that will be a
50-year retrospective of my original 1975 SCCS paper (
mrochkind.com/aup/talks/SCCS-Slideshow.pdf). Can some people here review a
couple of paragraphs for accuracy?

*Decentralized Version Control (DVCS)*

*While VCSs like CVS and Subversion were centralized and had
pre-commit merging, a further advance was towards decentralization, with
post-commit merging. Probably the first DVCS was Sun WorkShop TeamWare,
created by Larry McVoy and announced in 1992 [sun]. It was implemented as a
layer on top of SCCS. McVoy later commercialized a successor system called
BitKeeper [Bitkeeper], which was layered on a re-implementation of SCCS,
which he called BitSCCS. TeamWare and BitKeeper took advantage of the
interleaved delta algorithm, also known as a weave, to implement an
efficient way to represent merged deltas by reference, instead of
reproducing code inside the repository. This is a lot more complicated to
do with reverse deltas, introduced by RCS.*

*In 2005 Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux [linux], invented the DVCS Git
[git] for Linux development, and since then Git has become widely used and
has supplanted BitKeeper.*

[more about DVCS follows]


I don't want to add more detail that would make these paragraphs any
longer, but I do want them to be accurate. Thanks!

Marc Rochkind

-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20241214/954413cc/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the TUHS mailing list