31 Mar
2016
31 Mar
'16
12:28 a.m.
Marc Rochkind:
BSD is the new kind on the block. I don't think it came along until 1977 or
so. Research UNIX I don't think picked up SCCS ever. SCCS first appeared in
the PWB releases, if you don't count the earlier version in SNOBOL4 for the
IBM mainframes.
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Correct. We never needed no stinkin' revision control in Research.
More fairly, early systems like SCCS were so cumbersome that a
community that was fairly small, in which everyone talked to
everyone, and in which there was no glaring need wasn't willing
to adopt them.
I remember trying SCCS for a few small personal projects back in
1979 or so (well before I moved to New Jersey), finding it just
too clunky for the benefits it gave me, and giving up. Much later,
I found RCS just as messy. One thing that really bugged me was
those systems' inherent belief that you rarely want to keep a
checked-out copy of something except while you're working on it.
Another, harder to work around, is that in any nontrivial project
there are often stages when I want to make changes of scope broader
than a single file: factor common stuff out into a new file, merge
things into a single file, rename files, etc.
CVS was a big step forward, but not enough. Subversion was the
first revision-control that didn't feel like a huge burden to me.
None of which is to say that SCCS and RCS were useless; they were
important pioneers, and for the big projects that originally
spawned them I'm sure they were indispensible. But I can't imagine
Ken or Dennis putting up with them for very long, and I'm glad I
never had to.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON