[TUHS] A Retrospective on the Source Code Control System

[Luther Johnson]

I never knew the technical details of what you had done, but I enjoyed
using SCCS in the mid-80's when I started using UNIX, and it helped me
develop an understanding of source code management disciplines.
Sometimes I had to use RCS when SCCS wasn't available, later I used
everything else, as we all did, but I always liked the way SCCS worked
on those first SunOS and Ultrix systems where I encountered it,
especially when it was well understood by the make utility. Thank you
for this great contribution, and I enjoyed reading your paper just now.

On 01/06/2025 06:49 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Nice.
>
> For what it is worth, your SCCS supports merging just fine.  We used
> SCCS to do merges without copying by using your includes.  If SCCS had
> had a -m for merge, it would have included the branch but then all the
> other deltas going up to the GCA.  Much like the tip means the tip
> but all the other deltas going back to 1.1.
>
> SCCS was a big contribution to the state of the art, I am forever
> grateful that you did it.  To this day I don't think people know
> what you did.  When we were a business, every time some SCM came out,
> Rick or I would ask "is there a weave" like you had done, if not,
> we didn't care.  That weave format that you did 50 years ago is
> awesome.
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 06, 2025 at 06:16:25PM -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>> I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was writing this invited paper for an
>> upcoming 50-year anniversary of the first issue of IEEE Transactions on
>> Software Engineering.
>>
>> The paper has now been accepted for publication and here's a preprint
>> version of it:
>>
>> https://www.mrochkind.com/mrochkind/docs/SCCSretro2.pdf
>>
>> Marc