[TUHS] Re: SCCS, TeamWare, BitKeeper, and Git

At 2024-12-14T10:43:47-0700, Marc Rochkind wrote: I apologize for this not being quite responsive to your query, then. 1. Tom Lord's Arch (ca. 2001) was at one timely recognized for popularizing, or perhaps _introducing_, the notion of decentralized version control to the dot-com era of hard-scrabble FLOSS developers who were building "Web 2.0" and whose startup employers, be they flush with cash or not, generally would not spring for a commercial VCS (which might not have been decentralized anyway). The most salient point here is that Linus Torvalds was not prescient or uniquely perceptive in recognizing the value of a DVCS. Many people in the first half of the decade of the 2000s were chafing at the limitations of CVS in an increasingly networked environment, and Subversion was recognized as a conservative alternative even at the time. This was conventional wisdom among engineers at my workplace. I urge us not to contribute to Torvalds's cult of celebrity as we did (and do) that of Bill Joy or Steve Jobs, suggesting that they had unique insights when they plainly didn't. Sometimes a big name or reputation can lend some activation energy to an existing good idea (or persuade someone with a fat wallet to open it for financing of development), but it's important not to mistake what such celebrities should be credited with. An example is how people mis-credit Bill Joy, solely, with developing curses.[1] 2. "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.*" I'd a like a second footnote directing me to where I can understand the mathematics supporting this claim. Just out of nerd interest. Also, if one requires a shovel to bury Walter Tichy with, such a presentation would serve well... Regards, Branden [1] See, e.g., the section "Relationship with vi": https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html