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@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@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