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

On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 03:03:30PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: There is no question that there are other DCVS's which are more sophisticated than git. But one could argue that there are other OS's which are more "sophisticated", and that was their argument for why they were better than Unix. For example, I've had Multicians tell me about super-sophistcated things which Unix or any more modern Unix descendants *still* don't do, which they will claim is a reason why Multics is "superior" to Unix. But yet, there's no question that Multics was a commercial failure, and that Unix's simplicity and ease of porting to other architectures besides the DPS-8/M was one of the reasons why Unix succeeded and Multics has been consigned to the dustbin of history. So I find it interesting how one the one hand, we will extol the virtues of Unix's simplicity in terms of using byte streams for files, as oposed to the horrendous record-based files used by Mainframes and VMS, And yet we can *also* say that Git is stupid because it doesn't track renames, while Bitkeeper does, and therefore it is better than the simple blob-based model which is git. One could make the argumet that "git was lucky; it was in the right place at the right time, and managed to get mindshare", but I suspect there are other people who might say the same thing about Unix and it getting mindshare more out of luck than the fundametal superiority of its technical architecture. And I think there are many on this list who would contest mightily that Unix was "just lucky". Food for thought.... - Ted