14 Dec
2024
14 Dec
'24
3:27 a.m.
To answer your actual question, it is of course a riff on a TV ad for a
cockroach trap in the 1980s. The sentiment of the quote, as I saw it (it's
possible I was the one who added it to the fortunes file after ken saw the
SCCS burble at the top of some file from USG and laughed), was primarily a
reaction to the taint it added to the previously annotation-free top of the
file. It was also a response to the march of corporate code management
stepping into the research world, or perhaps the hacker world. It's a
philosophical thing, a feeling, not an argument.
It all seems so quaint now.
-rob
On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 8:22 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
According to the Unix room fortunes file, the actual
quote is
SCCS: the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out.
Ken Thompson
On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 3:52 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering has asked me to write a
> retrospective on the influence of SCCS over the last 50 years, as my SCCS
> paper was published in 1975. They consider it one of the most influential
> papers from TSE's first decade.
>
> There's a funny quote from Ken Thompson that circulates from time-to-time:
>
> "SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!"
>
> But nobody seems to know what it means exactly. As part of my research, I
> asked Ken what the quote meant, sunce I wanted to include it. He explained
> that it refers to SCCS storing binary data in its repository file,
> preventing UNIX text tools from operating on the file.
>
> Of course, this is only one of SCCS's many weaknesses. If you have
> anything funny about any of the others, post it here. I already have all
> the boring usual stuff (e.g., long-term locks, file-oriented, no merging).
>
> Marc Rochkind
> mrochkind.com
>
>
>
>
>