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

[replying to Marc's message because Larry's is not in my inbox] At 2024-12-14T12:13:40-0700, Marc Rochkind wrote: I get that you're attentive to the matter of priority here, but I wrote my paragraph carefully--although I see not quite carefully enough. Arch popularized or introduced the notion of decentralized version control to hard-scrabble FLOSS developers in the dot-com era whose employers would not spend money on a commercial VCS. I recollect now that BK was available under a free-to-use license--as long as one didn't get too curious, like Andrew Tridgell, or wish to remain at liberty to participate in FLOSS projects that were themselves VCSes. Such a restriction was unacceptable to engineers in my circle (Debian people, and Debian-adjacent people through my workplace). From our perspective, BitKeeper was about as affordable and as appealing as ClearCase. And at my workplace, management wasn't interested in paying money to cram down a VCS that the engineers would grumble about using. We muddled through, mostly with Subversion, as I recall. We didn't have to face the scale of coordination challenge that the Linux kernel did. I saw that, and it sheds some light, but it doesn't rise to the level of a theorem. If I were a mathematician, I might know what analytical discipline to bring to bear on my question to you, but the best I can do is to mumble about how it looks like you need both graph theory and set theory for this. And I lack the category theory or other means to understand whether and how those two might compose. And I don't know that category theory would even help; it simply seems to be the device most often employed to, uh, uncover higher-level isomorphisms in problem domains. (That's where I duck a tomato hurled from the audience.) A good mathematical expositor could, I add, employ these tools without leaning too hard on the formalisms, and produce a writeup that is broadly accessible. We used to have USENIX for this sort of thing... I dimly recall that the "merge problem" was one of the shoals upon which Subversion, if not quite ran aground upon, found itself adjacently becalmed. I've noted your enthusiasm for the weave and BK's amplification of the concept. What I think you need is, as noted, a mathematical expositor who can express the novelty of Rochkind's and your contributions in terms that professionals who have little contact with the problems of "source code configuration management" (an alternative nomenclature for "version control" I've encountered) can comprehend. You've tried popularizing to the masses. My conclusion is that, at best, they stare slackly at you and say, "Git does that. I use Git.". To get your innovation more broadly recognized, you may therefore have to take your case to the ivory tower. Despite the university training that many (most?) software engineers receive, and the many tools that other engineering disciplines and applied mathematics have to offer our field, there is little cross- pollination. Relatively few programmers actually read Dijkstra or Hoare. You're doing well if you can get them to read Brooks. Too often, in my view, the only value "theoretical computer science"[1] has is as a fountainhead of buzzwords one can spray on a slide deck for one's manager to pitch to a promotion committee. I had to go to work at a research lab to find an environment where people comfortably moved back and forth between these domains. Naturally, its budget got savaged. The grandparent organization wanted "an AI story". Regards, Branden [1] I strongly dislike that term because of what it implies when the modifier is deleted: if you have a science without a theoretical framework, what you have is not a science. I suspect it is preferred by math-phobes and managers who won't look past an impending deadline. ("Who cares if it won't scale? That's a problem for NEXT quarter. Get it into production.")