12 ms·

Version Control Before Git with CVS

152 points by chrizel 8y ago

Sir_Substance 8y ago
>Did you passive-aggressively rewrite a coworker’s poorly implemented function out of cathartic necessity, never intending for him to know? Too bad, he now thinks you’re a dick. Woof, I bet this guy's fun to have at standup.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  I also don’t understand - is he so used to git now that he thinks the idea that working copy=staging area and commit=push are terrifying? That’s the normal behavior of most version control systems. Only a couple of new distributed systems have separated staging and pushing. Just forget about commits, there are only pushes.
adrianN 8y ago
This article makes in seem like ancient history, but there are still projects around that use CVS or very similar VCS like for example ClearCase. My software engineering career started after git got popular, but I had to work with ClearCase. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. The inability to go back to old states of your project unless you happened to tag them makes finding the cause of bugs extremely hard. I don't know how it is in CVS, but in Clearcase you can tag only a subset of the files and what you check out from the server is determined by a complex configuration file ("the configuration specification"). This is an additional hurdle to reconstructing old states of your software because now you need to know the config-spec to do so. Even if you have the old config spec, it might contain fallback rules ("just take the latest version of the file") that effectively make it impossible to reproduce the old state. Unless you're extremely disciplined in your usage of the tool it's a real challenge to fix bugs for old releases. And don't get me started on trying to backport bugfixes into several old releases when branches are managed for each file separately. This lack of a proper project wide history also makes it extremely challenging to migrate to a different tool without losing a lot of information.
- vidarh 8y ago
  I have source sitting around that was maintained in CVS. Nothing I'm still using, but old archives I keep for nostalgia... But I feel really old now, when tech I used in the early part of my career is now considered ancient enough to justify "historical" accounts of how we worked in the dark ages. But I do remember when CVS was considered a step up, so I suppose I'm getting old.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    There are JavaScript frameworks from two years ago that are considered ancient, so don't let this get ya down, grandpa. ;)
- beefhash 8y ago
  Case in point: OpenBSD[1]. [1] https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/
  - Freaky 8y ago
    And NetBSD: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/ http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/
- renox 8y ago
  ClearCase is only similar to CVS as it is a centralised version control system otherwise it's very different
- mjw1007 8y ago
  CVS indeed has the problem where you can inadvertently tag only a subset of the files you shipped. But it did also let you check out files as of a particular timestamp, which could be more reliable.
- acemarke 8y ago
  We previously used Clearcase at work. At one point a coworker ran a survey asking for people's experience with different VCS options. The best reply I saw was : "Clearcase is the single most productivity destroying tool I have ever worked with."
Pete_D 8y ago
> When people talk about Git being a “distributed” system, this is primarily the difference they mean. In CVS, you can’t make commits locally. A commit is a submission of code to the central repository, so it’s not something you can do without a connection. Not just commits - log, diff, status, almost everything I can remember needed to go off to the remote repository for information. Not only was this annoying when you didn't have connectivity, it was slow when you did. I do occasionally miss the ability to version files individually though.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  CVS was really designed for multiple users logging in to the same server, so that repository access was working directly against the local filesystem. It was pretty fast in that setup. The network server stuff was hacked in on top.
- gkya 8y ago
  Thus is wrong: you can not commit locally means that the commit cannot be local to any checkout. You can perfectly have /some/directory on your computer be the CVSROOT.
  - betenoire 8y ago
    So... CVS isn't distributed. Which is what he said.
    - gkya 8y ago
      No they say it required network connectivity which is not correct. Also utilities exist to make it somewhat distributed.
- pimlottc 8y ago
  Subversion, for all its improvements, was the same way. I remember jumping through a lot of ssh proxytunnel hoops just to be able to check svn history when I was working at a remote customer site in 2006. The first time I ran “git commit” and it finished almost immediately blew my mind.
craigsmansion 8y ago
Nice article but the conclusion doesn't really follow from how the article is build up. > It illustrates well why understanding the history of software development can be so beneficial—picking up and re-examining obsolete tools will teach you volumes about the why behind the tools we use today. As the article re-examines this obsolete version management tool, it becomes clear it's pretty easy and straightforward and can do a lot of things that git can to a certain degree. On top of that it's dead-easy to setup and use, in fact, its simplicity might be an indication that's it's not all that obsolete and might be exactly the right fit for new small personal projects.
- bronson 8y ago
  Those are some really optimistic takeaways. I hope you'll try CVS and report back (especially a merge, or looking at project history including deleted files). I don't think any of these statements will stand up to scrutiny.
  - craigsmansion 8y ago
    I am using CVS (and even RCS) and for small personal projects, it's perfect. Maybe there are problems with merges or project history in a larger context, but as things are, at the end of the day, I type the single command `cvs commit' and have a magic backup with revision history as a bonus. Sometimes that's all a project needs.
gbroberts 8y ago
YYMV. I once submitted a patch to OpenBSD without any prior knowledge of CVS and found it easier than my first contact with GitHub. Pure git without GitHub may be a little easier than CVS.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Pure git isn't easier than CVS. Git just adds complexity over CVS (in parts just for the sake of being obtuse). CVS had its shortcomings, but complexity wasn't one of them.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
I think one has to work a little without a tool to truly understand why the tool has exists. Many new developers are forced to use git and they just don't understand why they have to go through this painful process. I started without version control. I very quickly realised that it's very easy to break a project but forget how to undo your latest breaking changes. I discovered subversion and it was amazing. It was 2006 and I was the only person on my course to my knowledge who was using version control. At around that time git came out and some people were trying it but many people said it was completely unnecessary for most projects. I then tried to use svn for a project with more than just myself as a developer and it was a disaster. We had giant commits once a day that cause conflicts every time. It was horrible. Git was truly amazing. I agree the cli isn't great (I use magit) but you have to have lived without it to understand why it's so important.
- setquk 8y ago
  I’ve built some big things on SVN. The same mistakes you make in SVN are totally portable to git as well. This isn’t talked about much because people are too ashamed to admit that it wasn’t the tools and was the process and management of the project that caused carnage. I’ve seen this three times now. The best and simultaneously the worst feature of git is the offline commit ability.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  SVN is one of the sanest and most robust VCSes there is. If even that leads to disaster, then throwing git at the team will only make things worse. You need to educate them about proper VCS use instead. We've recently transitioned to git at work and a couple of weeks later I'm already stuck in a week-long repository cleanup project on one of the central repositories because people just created a phenomenally huge mess in it. They were experienced and happy SVN users before, but somehow the boss forced the git hype train on us and has to pay the price now.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    It is not sane. They created a low level versioned network filesystem and then never bothered to implement branching, tagging, or merging in a workable way. In 2018 I still get bogus merge conflicts if someone before me didn't commit things just so.
jon-wood 8y ago
I guess I’ve become an old greybeard while I wasn’t paying attention. When I started out in software development CVS, and later Subversion were the best we had. The emergence of git and GitHub have transformed Open Source development, being able to just open a pull request or an issue and know you’ll get notified when things happen is great - I’ve submitted patches for many things which I just wouldn’t have bothered signing up to a mailing list to keep track of in the past. Signed, Github user 362 (from back before you could just sign up)
- cimmanom 8y ago
  It also tells you how quickly software employment has exploded, that so many (half? more?) developers have never used any version control (fundamental) tool other than one that's been common for only a decade. As recently as the first dot-com boom, Git didn't even exist. Even Subversion was brand new, and it was mind-blowing how much easier it was to work with than CVS. One aspect of history that this article glosses over is that Git is not the only or even the first third-generation version control tool created. The earliest buzz I remember around DVCS was for darcs and bazaar, neither of which I've heard mentioned since about 2009. Mercurial and Git were released around the same time as one another, and were in a vim-emacs sort of grudge match for a few years before Git became the clear winner. Mercurial seems to still be in use in some odd corners of both the corporate and open source worlds - probably a legacy of people choosing it for projects during that period before Git "won". When I first tried it it felt a lot like Subversion made distributed. Nowadays it feels incredibly clumsy next to Git.
  - cesarb 8y ago
    Don't forget monotone, which can be thought of as git's direct inspiration. The main difference being that monotone was painfully slow, while git was blazing fast.
  - muxator 8y ago
    That's not true, in my experience. Mercurial has exactly the same features - and maybe something more - than git, with a UX which is at least more consistent. The main problem I see with mercurial is that its team stays too quiet: everything is so smooth that probably nobody feels the need of doing much fuzz about it. The HN community has a high technical level, but during my career, out there in the world, I have seen a lot of different folks: people that constitute the bulk of the workforce often do not have a strong mastery of the tools they are required to use. Sometimes they just endure them. For these people, using an easier tool (and mercurial is a good candidate in my experience) could probably help them to really improve their skills and become more productive team members.
mooreds 8y ago
I started my software engineer using CVS. I was using CVS as recently as 2014. Why? Two reasons. I'd played with git but hadn't really understood the power of trivial branching (though I was one of those CVS power users who could branch, but tended to use my IDE to manage it). I remember thinking to myself, oh this is like CVS, because that is how I used it when I played with it. The bigger reason is that I was managing a team of 2-4 developers that rarely worked on the same thing. We all worked in the same room. The codebase was relatively small (35k loc). I could see no good reason to make the change when CVS was "good enough". I was the same reason we used the same old crufty bug tracker--too many features to write to spend time upgrading infrastructure. Unless it was a 2x efficacy improvement; we did add automated testing and scripting around deploys because the benefits were obvious. Now I love git and the power to branch and stage commits but I am still not sure it's needed for colocated teams of that size.
- mikeash 8y ago
  It certainly isn’t needed, but got has nice advantages even for solo work, let alone small teams.
  - mooreds 8y ago
    Sure, and now git is well enough known to be a good default. But if the choice is no version control or CVS, I'll pick CVS. (If the choice is no version control or RCS, I'll pick RCS, too.) Note that I realize that you didn't argue for no version control.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I'll second your suggestion that centralized version control systems have advantages for small projects. I use SVN for most of my personal projects, because no one else is contributing. (Only one branch. In fact, I have never branched in SVN.) The simplicity is a major benefit. The main downside is how condescending some Git users can be to SVN users. When I mention I use SVN, I often hear nonsense like "Oh, you must not understand tree structures." Actually, I do, and I see that they have no benefit for certain things I'm working on. The one thing I'd like is the ability to commit without an internet connection, which distributed systems can easily do. But this hasn't been enough of an issue to motivate a switch.
e40 8y ago
I remember importing all our RCS files into our first CVS repository, around 1991. It was back when CVS was primarily used for maintenance of SunOS. As a result, this is the first commit in the repo I spend most of my time in: commit 0d92e7f51fa3e1dd3d2257e9900e7ea0b37d96de Author: jkf <jkf> Date: Mon Oct 21 07:53:43 1985 +0000 Initial revision RCS migrated to CVS which migrated to git.
jdblair 8y ago
CVS was awful, but it was so much better than RCS, which operated only on single files. There was a time in the late 90s when CVS + Bugzilla + Tinderbox was the state of the art of CI if your toolset was all open source. I used this combination at multiple workplaces 1998-2002. It worked and we shipped, but we didn't really understand how bad the tools were. At Sun all stuff was in Teamware, except when it wasn't, because every group at Sun could do whatever they wanted to (we used SVN in the x86 ILOM team). Teamware was good but suffered by being a wrapper on top of SCCS. SVN was a revelation after CVS. I resisted switching to git from SVN for a long time because the mental model for SVN is so much simpler: everything is in one central place, every change is marked with a monotonically increasing version number, remember a number and you can always reproduce the state of the project. Eventually I saw the huge benefit of the "git workflow" (local branches, pull requests) for collaboration. Branches in SVN are error prone and always risked painful conflict resolution, so we made them rarely. Perforce, which is commercial, was like stepping into another dimension (you mean all this stuff just works? Out of the box?). There's another historical timeline where Perforce has an early open-source model (like Redhat) and is the dominant VCS. I enjoyed that remembrance of 20 years working on free-software based projects, not a bad way to start Sunday. I hope it was worth your time!
- oblio 8y ago
  I still don’t like the Perforce model of workspaces or whatever they call it (clients?). That mapping between the server folders and your local ones. Extra complexity for no obvious benefit I could see.
  - solipsism 8y ago
    The complexity is completely optional. Your client map can just map the entire depot to a single directory. And it has always been very easy to enforce this at the organizational level, with a small script in the server.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    For the right use case workspaces are awesome. We used to do code + art in the same 1TB perforce repo back when I did gamedev. Art folder was ~600GB. Having a workspace to eliminate that as a developer was awesome. Git still fails to even approach the usefulness that P4 brought to those types of shops. Between the auto-cache proxies, dealing with 1TB+ repos and workspaces there's a reason P4 still does pretty well.
gregmac 8y ago
Though I had experience with cvs and subversion mostly through open source (mostly in sourceforge), I remember installing Trac around the time it first came out, and using that as equivalent to what would be done with GitHub today. Of course you had to have one install of it per project (or per 'organization', depending on your repository setup), and run it on a server somewhere. Trac was great though, especially for the time: subversion server, source and changeset browser, tickets, wiki, roadmap. Aside from my own personal stuff, I switched several open source projects to it, and got a couple companies on to it. It quickly became to me an essential part of the dev stack, and was a great way to get the full dev stack* up and running relatively quickly. * Other than continuous integration, but for me that came later. I worked on a lot of php stuff that could be deployed from source and never really saw the need then. Now I think it's essential and don't work without it.
rajuljain883 8y ago
I don't know why my company use perforce
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  What’s wrong with it? Perforce is excellent. Git is OK but owes a lot of its popularity to its price.
  - pletnes 8y ago
    The fact that branching = copied directories is certainly wrong.
    - ebikelaw 8y ago
      Branches are virtual copies/views in p4.
      - pletnes 8y ago
        Then some user will copy a directory, check it in, and declare that s/he «has branched the code». Oh, and quietly pull in some other directory, which is clearly not branched. This is just broken IMHO.
- JackCh 8y ago
  Probably because Perforce scales to truly massive monolithic repos while git traditionally doesn't (the insanity going on at Microsoft notwithstanding.) Personally I feel the best method is using lots of small repos, one for each service or library, that get stitched together by the build system. I know some large tech companies have created such systems and I have experience with one of them working very well (they migrated from perforce). But this is a big change from the monolithic repository model and institutional inertia is very real. (Perforce will eventually start to hit a wall when you get to the point where money won't buy hardware big enough for Perforce to serve your repo fast, but that's a very long way off for most organizations and I believe there are some mitigations for it.)
notaplumber 8y ago
"Opening the Source Repository with Anonymous CVS." Usenix 1999, by Charles D. Cranor (AT&T), Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD). https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.ps https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.ps OpenBSDs involvement here is conveniently missing, arguably GitHub may not have ever existed. Also of note, despite the paper being presented in 1999, AnonCVS was operating as early as 1995. Other projects were still putting tarballs on FTP, no read access to source history.
tootie 8y ago
My first professional coding job used SourceSafe which was lock-based so you couldn't even do concurrent versioning. Everyone had to take turns with the files.
- mobilio 8y ago
  Mine first was using SourceOff Site (Source Safe extension).
- __david__ 8y ago
  SourceSafe also allowed you to checkout files in non-exclusive mode which made it more like CVS. It also had a way to share files across different directories, a feature we emulated in CVS by symlinking files in the CVS_ROOT. Also, fun fact: SourceSafe was the first cross platform VCS I used. There were Mac, Unix, and dos/windows versions. Then Microsoft bought it and axed everything except dos/windows. :-(
- toolslive 8y ago
  Source safe had no real server. So if you faced a difficult merge because your colleague just committed something huge, you could just set your clock back and commit before him, walk over to his desk and tell him he broke the build.
  - cakes 8y ago
    Or just delete the source safe files from the share and have everybody in a panic (this happened where I worked in ~2010 for some legacy apps still in source safe...it was an untrained user trying to undo a change).
- slobotron 8y ago
  Our merge strategy with SourceSafe was to always do a 3 way merge (using Araxis) between: - your latest changes - version of the code before you made changes - latest version of the code on the server So yes, would have 3 full checkouts of the project locally to accomplish this. I guess it boils down to "patch" workflow, except you get to both create and apply the patch yourself. We used a real-world commit token (rubber duck IIRC) to make sure only one person was doing merges at a time... (Tortoise)SVN was an easy sell when we discovered it.
silverlake 8y ago
i work at a big bank that still uses CVS for most of their software. They use SVN for "modern" projects, and only recently started dabbling in git. The place is a tech museum.
kiallmacinnes 8y ago
> So I invite you to come along with me on an exciting journey and spend the next ten minutes of your life learning about a piece of software nobody has used in the last decade. I know of companies who only very recently moved from CVS, and I'd bet there are many that still use it too.. Assertions like this are always dangerous, because inevitably, someone somewhere is still using that tech you think is long dead ;)
MatthewWilkes 8y ago
This is a really interesting perspective for people who haven't grown up with Git. I'd not grokked a distinction between three generations of VCS before and it's strange to me to hear git's bad UI described as something other people think.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gkya 8y ago
A CVS lifesaver that you can put into your shell init file: export CVS_RSH=ssh This defaults to rsh and figuring out that I had to set it like this took me a shameful amount of time (mostly because it produces such and unhelpful error message). I literally couldn't pull the OpenBSD src tree for months... I'm one of the few people who deliberately learned and used CVS (for a while) in recent times. I did not have any public repositories at the time and needed VCS for my configuration and some documents (Org mode mostly), and the model where I could have a central repository on a local directory which I could easily back up was compelling. Then I figured out a filesystem layout where I could back up all my work easily and this became useless, thus I switched to Mercurial. Nowadays I'm considering going just git, because it's what everybody uses, and Magit is a compelling piece of software. I use RCS regularly along with Mercurial and Git nowadays. RCS is good for e.g. when I have a tree where most of the content is pdf files (papers), images, and other binary data that does not really need to be version controlled, together with an Org mode files for notes. I also have a pool of Elisp files which contain the personal bits of my Emacs configuration, and I use RCS on them because their histories are not related to one another. It's no good for projects anymore because it is essentialy a tool used when people used a single computer to develop software to which they connected w/ terminals, so they were all users of the same machine and the code was always in a determined location. One thing people tend to confuse with CVS or SVN is that they think it's a client/server model whereas it's actually a repo/checkout model. The repo is central and can totally reside in a local tree, and checkins from different checkouts go directly to that repo. This is akin to sharing one .git tree between all your checkouts of a single repository.
simula67 8y ago
What would version control look like after Git ? Git famously was not built for monorepo [1] I would like to see sub-tree checkouts, sub-tree history, storing giant asset files in repo ( without the git-lfs hack ), more consistent commands, some sort of API where compilers and build systems can integrate into revision control etc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu.be&t=2595 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu.be...
- mmphosis 8y ago
  WWgitND, or “What Would git Not Do.
peterwwillis 8y ago
RCS was okay if you were a sysadmin, terrible for everyone else. CVS was okay, but still limited. SVN was more advanced, but buggy as hell. Git is more advanced and less buggy, but over-complicated and unintuitive. Git was actually started in order to complete core functionality and let someone else make the front-end for the VCS. But somewhere along the line people just decided they didn't need a user friendly frontend, and now the core is what people use every day. 13 years later and it's still difficult to use. Unless someone comes up with a really slick universal frontend for it, it's probably time for a new VCS.
- cpdt 8y ago
  What about Mercurial?
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Good question. I never gave it a fair shot, and it used to have some flaws, but maybe it's cleaned those up by now.
  - gHosts 8y ago
    Really slick, really easy, really powerful. Combined with Evolution extension.. unbeatable. I have used SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, bzr, git, but hg is by far the least pain and most powerful I have seen.
  - bsder 8y ago
    Hush. Please leave everybody on git so that I can have a competitive advantage over them.
- dilap 8y ago
  the funny thing about git is the conceptual model is clean. DAG of commits, content-addressable file-system. cool. what's insane is the CLI -- a random mismash of commands, all of which do like 4 different only vaguely related things. it's a total clusterfuck.
foreigner 8y ago
This is a really fun article. I started with CVS, graduated to Subversion, and now to Git. It makes me really curious what the next paradigm shift will be! The way I see it the evolution of these version control systems was driven by the precipitously falling price of disk space. CVS only stored a tiny bit of metadata locally so almost every operation required contacting the server. That made using CVS very slow and branching expensive. Subversion stored a whole separate copy of every file locally. This made the critical "show me just my local changes" operation an order of magnitude faster and made branching cheap, at the expense of doubling the disk usage. Git stores the entire history of everything locally (compressed). This makes most operations an order of magnitude faster still, so much faster that some things that were completely impractical with the earlier systems is now routine, and branches are free. What's coming next?
- alkonaut 8y ago
  I hope pijul will gain traction soon: https://pijul.org https://pijul.org
  - dilap 8y ago
    How's it scale w/ repo size? How about large binaries? Those are the biggest pain points I have with git.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      It's possible to check out partially without hacking, so should be in a better place than git in that respect. Other than that I'm not sure if there is any support (similar to LFS). It's also very much in its infancy so performance is likely not a primary focus.
      - dilap 8y ago
        Hopefully not not a consideration, either, though. :-) Definitely a very interesting project. Will have to play around with it a bit.
_jsdw 8y ago
I wonder whether something like pijul (https://pijul.org https://pijul.org) might represent the next step forwards; I am no expert in these things but the patch based approach it takes sounds interesting and potentially very intuitive to work with. I might have to actually give it a go one of these days!
- dralley 8y ago
  I feel bad for thinking that it's a terrible name, since it's probably a fine name in some other language, and I don't want to be an entitled American English speaker expecting literally everything software related to be in English. And yet, it's a great tool that I suspect that it will never get traction for precisely that reason. The abundance of options enables people to be shallow enough that a silly-sounding name knocks it out of consideration.
  - methyl 8y ago
    What's wrong with this name?
    - jedieaston 8y ago
      As an english speaker, I don’t know how to pronounce it. Git, subversion, sourcesafe, they can all be easily pronounced.
  - bovine3dom 8y ago
    > a silly-sounding name knocks it out of consideration. I wonder why the same didn't happen with git. It's really rather rude in English.
  - jldugger 8y ago
    > And yet, it's a great tool that I suspect that it will never get traction for precisely that reason. Git is like 10x worse and still 'won'.
jedberg 8y ago
I enjoyed skipping the part of the article that explains how CVS worked, because I lived it. :) CVS at the time felt like an amazing upgrade to RCS, just like Git feels like an amazing upgrade to CVS. I wonder though, have we reached the end? If there anything beyond Git? When I used RCS, I would always lament "it would be nice if two of us could work on a file at the same time". When I was using CVS, I'd lament, "It would be nice if two of us could work on a group of files at the same time and merge our changes". But using Git, my only lament is, "I wish this were easier for new developers" and "it would be great if there were a standard workflow". Problem one has been somewhat solved by GitHub/GitLab, and problem two has been solved by some pretty standard git-flow tools. Neither one really demands a new paradigm in VCS though.
- jpeloquin 8y ago
  > Have we reached the end? If there anything beyond Git? The ability to split and merge repositories as easily as we can split and merge branches might open up some new use patterns. The particular context I'm thinking of is scientific repositories. These tend to grow in size and scope in an unplanned manner. Pieces inevitably need to be split off for a collaboration, to be made public, or because someone is changing institutions and needs to take part of the project with them.
angry_octet 8y ago
Others having mentioned the terror that was Clear Case, but I just want to highlight one of its bad features: everything was stored in a relational DB. And consistency was not guaranteed, so at one point all the code was corrupted. After recovery from the backup, it was retired with vengence, and everything went back to RCS and CVS. When I wanted everyone to switch to Git or Mercurial (~2007) the main questions were about branch merges (MUCH easier in git than CVS) and the reliability of the version storage. Many have now moved back to a centralised model of control (github), even if they have many partial copies. The incredibly RDBMS (non-git) method of managing the meta-data of github systems is very disappointing, but not surprising. If github is 4th gen, then I'm hoping for 5th gen, where all SE meta data is also available as a replicated database, which you can spin up with a local httpd.
- ptman 8y ago
  You mean like fossil https://fossil-scm.org/ https://fossil-scm.org/ ?
  - angry_octet 8y ago
    While there are nice features in fossil (and sqlite is fantastic), but it is not git compatible. If the code and artifacts were kept in git underneath then exchanging code with other repos would be seamless. I don't understand why they rejected keeping tickets as files in a version control system (separate from the code), instead of blobs. It just seems unfriendly to manipulation by other tools. Philosophically, I like that git can be extended with small tools and modules instead of a monolithic executable.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Git is pretty agnostic to storage. There are implementations that use RDBMS for storage quite successfully (TFS/VSTS). It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of queries can be significantly faster to perform over git repos stored this way. https://www.richard-banks.org/2014/02/tfs-internals-how-does-tfs-store-git.html https://www.richard-banks.org/2014/02/tfs-internals-how-does...
Ensorceled 8y ago
While CVS may have originated with Grune, I think the CVS everybody is actually familiar with is the version Brian Berliner wrote and maintained for years.
perlgeek 8y ago
I didn't have much contact with CVS, but I used SVN quite a bit. Things I remember from these days: * There was no separation between commit and push. How weird. * "svn log" or "svn blame" would take ages, because it had to tal to the server. * Well-run larger projects had branching guides, because the built-in commands didn't track enough meta data to do merges safely later on * SVN made it trivial to checkout only a subdirectory of a bigger repository (which I still sometimes miss in git), so people often tracked different projects in separate directories of one repository. The only thing I remember about CVS was that to clone something from CVS, you had to know some root directory (this presumably was the webroot), and sourceforge.net didn't show available webroots -- so there were tons of technically "open source" repositories that you still couldn't clone, because the webroot wasn't documented.
- opk 8y ago
  With cvs, specify just "." and it will checkout all the modules in the CVS repository. That would include CVSROOT which was the module containing hooks. But, yes it was sometimes annoying that the module name wasn't clearly documented.
mathewsanders 8y ago
My first job in the US ~2011 was in design team at monster.com. One of the engineers had made a SVN repository for all our design specs and had cooked up a simple intranet page where the latest version of a design could always be shared by a permanent URL but also a history of all earlier versions. That was my first experience with version control and I remember thinking it was magic. I never found out who made that, so if you’re reading thanks for going the extra mile :)
lokufda222 8y ago
We still use CVS at work ... FML I need a new job!
- bsder 8y ago
  Um, be glad your company uses source control.
tedunangst 8y ago
> Do you enjoy spending 40 minutes repeatedly running git rebase -i until your local commit history flows like the derivation of a mathematical proof? Hells no.
- dilap 8y ago
  I enjoy spending a couple minutes squashing, splitting, reordering and tweaking commit messages in GitUp to make my commit history look nice. I do wonder if it's pointless though. Not clear time spent on stuff like that is really worth, vs how often you need to go back and check the history. Maybe it's all just a exercise in OCD.
  - kenoyer130 8y ago
    Work on a code base with 40 plus developers and 30-40 commits a day. Having a clean commit history is a must versus "test commit", "fixed that thing", "added" etc.
jancsika 8y ago
> If cvs commit is what you were used to, then I’m sure staging and pushing changes would strike you as a pointless chore. But using only `cvs commit` would be the equivalent of using a single script with git that adds every single thing in the relevant dirs and then blindly commits it. In other words, the people coming from cvs and svn and complaining that git added a step for them were either doing an impeccable job of keeping their source dirs clean at all times, or they were implicitly admitting that they weren't keeping track of what they were adding to their own repos. I would guess there are old projects that fit the latter description. But I know from experience there are old projects that clearly fit the latter.
- perlgeek 8y ago
  At least with svn it was best practice to run `svn diff` before committing, just like `git add -p` is considered a better practice than `git commit -a`. SVN also allowed you to commit only specific files, so if your working directory wasn't clean, you could mostly still commit just the parts you wanted to commit.
cpeterso 8y ago
In another timeline where git never existed: https://SVNHub.com/ https://SVNHub.com/
kyberias 8y ago
> Did you passive-aggressively rewrite a coworker’s poorly implemented function out of cathartic necessity, never intending for him to know? Too bad, he now thinks you’re a dick. When did it start to be like this? Making code better is a dick move now? Who rewrites stuff passive-aggressively? What does that even mean?
yread 8y ago
I miss bazaar a bit it felt like a saner git and moving to it from SVN and CVS didn't require huge mindset changes
known 8y ago
CVS served its purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_version_control_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_version_control_...
djhworld 8y ago
My professional career started in 2008, but I didn't personally use Git/Github until maybe 2010 or so, but it still took until 2015 for me to be able to use Git/Github at work! Version control system timeline for me has been IBM ClearCase -> CVS -> Perforce -> SVN -> Git The non linear path is from switching jobs/working on legacy projects, but yeah. Git has it's problems, especially on usability, but it's much better than all the others in that list!
rukuu_001 8y ago
Used CVS with my team for years, say what you like, it was rock solid on branches. I was appalled first time I had to pick apart a mess made by SVN on a branch. I’ve made peace with git now, but struggled with the many different ways of getting things done in git.
knorker 8y ago
This post does not do justice to just how awful CVS is. OpenBSD still uses it, and it's the main reason I've only rarely contributed patches. CVS is just that crappy. When I say it's awful I should admit that like FORTRAN it's not bad for its time. But 1986 was 32 years ago. It's not bad because it's old, but it's not 32 years of good either. Commodore 64 was great for its time, but I'm not going to load my version control from a cassette player in 2018.
jbgreer 8y ago
I see a couple of other references so I know I'm not unique, but my first experience of version control was SCCS on SCO Xenix. Then RCS, CVS, SVN and Git. I never used Perforce or ClearCase. Knew some folks who used PVCS and StarTeam and Visual SourceSafe. I played with Bazaar, Monotone, Mercurial and Darcs but not enough to really appreciate them. As an aside, I met Larry McVoy at a Linux convention in 1999 and heard him speak about BitKeeper. Those were interesting times.
ggm 8y ago
RCS was god. I loved RCS. Firstly, unlike SCCS it was head state so fast (SCCS recalced head from the history of change from base) Secondly, because it wasn't CVS all that branch and remote crappe was irrelevant. I never learned CVS. My peers at work hate me because I think branches are something you prune off a rose bush in winter. (I use git now)
dreamcompiler 8y ago
My temporal progression went CVS -> SVN -> Mercurial -> Git. Every one of those was a major upgrade in functionality except the last. I never fought against Mercurial, and I rarely needed to Google "how do you do X with Mercurial" because it was so intuitive. But I spend about 30 minutes a day fighting with or googling git. Git is a horrible mess, but I like everybody else am forced to use it.

152 points by chrizel 8y ago

>Did you passive-aggressively rewrite a coworker’s poorly implemented function out of cathartic necessity, never intending for him to know? Too bad, he now thinks you’re a dick. Woof, I bet this guy's fun to have at standup.

alkonaut 8y ago
I also don’t understand - is he so used to git now that he thinks the idea that working copy=staging area and commit=push are terrifying? That’s the normal behavior of most version control systems. Only a couple of new distributed systems have separated staging and pushing. Just forget about commits, there are only pushes.

adrianN 8y ago

This article makes in seem like ancient history, but there are still projects around that use CVS or very similar VCS like for example ClearCase. My software engineering career started after git got popular, but I had to work with ClearCase. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. The inability to go back to old states of your project unless you happened to tag them makes finding the cause of bugs extremely hard. I don't know how it is in CVS, but in Clearcase you can tag only a subset of the files and what you check out from the server is determined by a complex configuration file ("the configuration specification"). This is an additional hurdle to reconstructing old states of your software because now you need to know the config-spec to do so. Even if you have the old config spec, it might contain fallback rules ("just take the latest version of the file") that effectively make it impossible to reproduce the old state. Unless you're extremely disciplined in your usage of the tool it's a real challenge to fix bugs for old releases. And don't get me started on trying to backport bugfixes into several old releases when branches are managed for each file separately. This lack of a proper project wide history also makes it extremely challenging to migrate to a different tool without losing a lot of information.

vidarh 8y ago
I have source sitting around that was maintained in CVS. Nothing I'm still using, but old archives I keep for nostalgia... But I feel really old now, when tech I used in the early part of my career is now considered ancient enough to justify "historical" accounts of how we worked in the dark ages. But I do remember when CVS was considered a step up, so I suppose I'm getting old.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  There are JavaScript frameworks from two years ago that are considered ancient, so don't let this get ya down, grandpa. ;)
beefhash 8y ago
Case in point: OpenBSD[1]. [1] https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/
- Freaky 8y ago
  And NetBSD: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/ http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/
renox 8y ago
ClearCase is only similar to CVS as it is a centralised version control system otherwise it's very different
mjw1007 8y ago
CVS indeed has the problem where you can inadvertently tag only a subset of the files you shipped. But it did also let you check out files as of a particular timestamp, which could be more reliable.
acemarke 8y ago
We previously used Clearcase at work. At one point a coworker ran a survey asking for people's experience with different VCS options. The best reply I saw was : "Clearcase is the single most productivity destroying tool I have ever worked with."

Pete_D 8y ago

> When people talk about Git being a “distributed” system, this is primarily the difference they mean. In CVS, you can’t make commits locally. A commit is a submission of code to the central repository, so it’s not something you can do without a connection. Not just commits - log, diff, status, almost everything I can remember needed to go off to the remote repository for information. Not only was this annoying when you didn't have connectivity, it was slow when you did. I do occasionally miss the ability to version files individually though.

mjw1007 8y ago
CVS was really designed for multiple users logging in to the same server, so that repository access was working directly against the local filesystem. It was pretty fast in that setup. The network server stuff was hacked in on top.
gkya 8y ago
Thus is wrong: you can not commit locally means that the commit cannot be local to any checkout. You can perfectly have /some/directory on your computer be the CVSROOT.
- betenoire 8y ago
  So... CVS isn't distributed. Which is what he said.
  - gkya 8y ago
    No they say it required network connectivity which is not correct. Also utilities exist to make it somewhat distributed.
pimlottc 8y ago
Subversion, for all its improvements, was the same way. I remember jumping through a lot of ssh proxytunnel hoops just to be able to check svn history when I was working at a remote customer site in 2006. The first time I ran “git commit” and it finished almost immediately blew my mind.

craigsmansion 8y ago

Nice article but the conclusion doesn't really follow from how the article is build up. > It illustrates well why understanding the history of software development can be so beneficial—picking up and re-examining obsolete tools will teach you volumes about the why behind the tools we use today. As the article re-examines this obsolete version management tool, it becomes clear it's pretty easy and straightforward and can do a lot of things that git can to a certain degree. On top of that it's dead-easy to setup and use, in fact, its simplicity might be an indication that's it's not all that obsolete and might be exactly the right fit for new small personal projects.

bronson 8y ago
Those are some really optimistic takeaways. I hope you'll try CVS and report back (especially a merge, or looking at project history including deleted files). I don't think any of these statements will stand up to scrutiny.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  I am using CVS (and even RCS) and for small personal projects, it's perfect. Maybe there are problems with merges or project history in a larger context, but as things are, at the end of the day, I type the single command `cvs commit' and have a magic backup with revision history as a bonus. Sometimes that's all a project needs.

gbroberts 8y ago

YYMV. I once submitted a patch to OpenBSD without any prior knowledge of CVS and found it easier than my first contact with GitHub. Pure git without GitHub may be a little easier than CVS.

gmueckl 8y ago
Pure git isn't easier than CVS. Git just adds complexity over CVS (in parts just for the sake of being obtuse). CVS had its shortcomings, but complexity wasn't one of them.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

I think one has to work a little without a tool to truly understand why the tool has exists. Many new developers are forced to use git and they just don't understand why they have to go through this painful process. I started without version control. I very quickly realised that it's very easy to break a project but forget how to undo your latest breaking changes. I discovered subversion and it was amazing. It was 2006 and I was the only person on my course to my knowledge who was using version control. At around that time git came out and some people were trying it but many people said it was completely unnecessary for most projects. I then tried to use svn for a project with more than just myself as a developer and it was a disaster. We had giant commits once a day that cause conflicts every time. It was horrible. Git was truly amazing. I agree the cli isn't great (I use magit) but you have to have lived without it to understand why it's so important.

setquk 8y ago
I’ve built some big things on SVN. The same mistakes you make in SVN are totally portable to git as well. This isn’t talked about much because people are too ashamed to admit that it wasn’t the tools and was the process and management of the project that caused carnage. I’ve seen this three times now. The best and simultaneously the worst feature of git is the offline commit ability.
gmueckl 8y ago
SVN is one of the sanest and most robust VCSes there is. If even that leads to disaster, then throwing git at the team will only make things worse. You need to educate them about proper VCS use instead. We've recently transitioned to git at work and a couple of weeks later I'm already stuck in a week-long repository cleanup project on one of the central repositories because people just created a phenomenally huge mess in it. They were experienced and happy SVN users before, but somehow the boss forced the git hype train on us and has to pay the price now.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  It is not sane. They created a low level versioned network filesystem and then never bothered to implement branching, tagging, or merging in a workable way. In 2018 I still get bogus merge conflicts if someone before me didn't commit things just so.

jon-wood 8y ago

I guess I’ve become an old greybeard while I wasn’t paying attention. When I started out in software development CVS, and later Subversion were the best we had. The emergence of git and GitHub have transformed Open Source development, being able to just open a pull request or an issue and know you’ll get notified when things happen is great - I’ve submitted patches for many things which I just wouldn’t have bothered signing up to a mailing list to keep track of in the past. Signed, Github user 362 (from back before you could just sign up)

cimmanom 8y ago
It also tells you how quickly software employment has exploded, that so many (half? more?) developers have never used any version control (fundamental) tool other than one that's been common for only a decade. As recently as the first dot-com boom, Git didn't even exist. Even Subversion was brand new, and it was mind-blowing how much easier it was to work with than CVS. One aspect of history that this article glosses over is that Git is not the only or even the first third-generation version control tool created. The earliest buzz I remember around DVCS was for darcs and bazaar, neither of which I've heard mentioned since about 2009. Mercurial and Git were released around the same time as one another, and were in a vim-emacs sort of grudge match for a few years before Git became the clear winner. Mercurial seems to still be in use in some odd corners of both the corporate and open source worlds - probably a legacy of people choosing it for projects during that period before Git "won". When I first tried it it felt a lot like Subversion made distributed. Nowadays it feels incredibly clumsy next to Git.
- cesarb 8y ago
  Don't forget monotone, which can be thought of as git's direct inspiration. The main difference being that monotone was painfully slow, while git was blazing fast.
- muxator 8y ago
  That's not true, in my experience. Mercurial has exactly the same features - and maybe something more - than git, with a UX which is at least more consistent. The main problem I see with mercurial is that its team stays too quiet: everything is so smooth that probably nobody feels the need of doing much fuzz about it. The HN community has a high technical level, but during my career, out there in the world, I have seen a lot of different folks: people that constitute the bulk of the workforce often do not have a strong mastery of the tools they are required to use. Sometimes they just endure them. For these people, using an easier tool (and mercurial is a good candidate in my experience) could probably help them to really improve their skills and become more productive team members.

mooreds 8y ago

I started my software engineer using CVS. I was using CVS as recently as 2014. Why? Two reasons. I'd played with git but hadn't really understood the power of trivial branching (though I was one of those CVS power users who could branch, but tended to use my IDE to manage it). I remember thinking to myself, oh this is like CVS, because that is how I used it when I played with it. The bigger reason is that I was managing a team of 2-4 developers that rarely worked on the same thing. We all worked in the same room. The codebase was relatively small (35k loc). I could see no good reason to make the change when CVS was "good enough". I was the same reason we used the same old crufty bug tracker--too many features to write to spend time upgrading infrastructure. Unless it was a 2x efficacy improvement; we did add automated testing and scripting around deploys because the benefits were obvious. Now I love git and the power to branch and stage commits but I am still not sure it's needed for colocated teams of that size.

mikeash 8y ago
It certainly isn’t needed, but got has nice advantages even for solo work, let alone small teams.
- mooreds 8y ago
  Sure, and now git is well enough known to be a good default. But if the choice is no version control or CVS, I'll pick CVS. (If the choice is no version control or RCS, I'll pick RCS, too.) Note that I realize that you didn't argue for no version control.
btrettel 8y ago
I'll second your suggestion that centralized version control systems have advantages for small projects. I use SVN for most of my personal projects, because no one else is contributing. (Only one branch. In fact, I have never branched in SVN.) The simplicity is a major benefit. The main downside is how condescending some Git users can be to SVN users. When I mention I use SVN, I often hear nonsense like "Oh, you must not understand tree structures." Actually, I do, and I see that they have no benefit for certain things I'm working on. The one thing I'd like is the ability to commit without an internet connection, which distributed systems can easily do. But this hasn't been enough of an issue to motivate a switch.

e40 8y ago

I remember importing all our RCS files into our first CVS repository, around 1991. It was back when CVS was primarily used for maintenance of SunOS. As a result, this is the first commit in the repo I spend most of my time in: commit 0d92e7f51fa3e1dd3d2257e9900e7ea0b37d96de Author: jkf <jkf> Date: Mon Oct 21 07:53:43 1985 +0000 Initial revision RCS migrated to CVS which migrated to git.

jdblair 8y ago

CVS was awful, but it was so much better than RCS, which operated only on single files. There was a time in the late 90s when CVS + Bugzilla + Tinderbox was the state of the art of CI if your toolset was all open source. I used this combination at multiple workplaces 1998-2002. It worked and we shipped, but we didn't really understand how bad the tools were. At Sun all stuff was in Teamware, except when it wasn't, because every group at Sun could do whatever they wanted to (we used SVN in the x86 ILOM team). Teamware was good but suffered by being a wrapper on top of SCCS. SVN was a revelation after CVS. I resisted switching to git from SVN for a long time because the mental model for SVN is so much simpler: everything is in one central place, every change is marked with a monotonically increasing version number, remember a number and you can always reproduce the state of the project. Eventually I saw the huge benefit of the "git workflow" (local branches, pull requests) for collaboration. Branches in SVN are error prone and always risked painful conflict resolution, so we made them rarely. Perforce, which is commercial, was like stepping into another dimension (you mean all this stuff just works? Out of the box?). There's another historical timeline where Perforce has an early open-source model (like Redhat) and is the dominant VCS. I enjoyed that remembrance of 20 years working on free-software based projects, not a bad way to start Sunday. I hope it was worth your time!

oblio 8y ago
I still don’t like the Perforce model of workspaces or whatever they call it (clients?). That mapping between the server folders and your local ones. Extra complexity for no obvious benefit I could see.
- solipsism 8y ago
  The complexity is completely optional. Your client map can just map the entire depot to a single directory. And it has always been very easy to enforce this at the organizational level, with a small script in the server.
- vvanders 8y ago
  For the right use case workspaces are awesome. We used to do code + art in the same 1TB perforce repo back when I did gamedev. Art folder was ~600GB. Having a workspace to eliminate that as a developer was awesome. Git still fails to even approach the usefulness that P4 brought to those types of shops. Between the auto-cache proxies, dealing with 1TB+ repos and workspaces there's a reason P4 still does pretty well.

gregmac 8y ago

Though I had experience with cvs and subversion mostly through open source (mostly in sourceforge), I remember installing Trac around the time it first came out, and using that as equivalent to what would be done with GitHub today. Of course you had to have one install of it per project (or per 'organization', depending on your repository setup), and run it on a server somewhere. Trac was great though, especially for the time: subversion server, source and changeset browser, tickets, wiki, roadmap. Aside from my own personal stuff, I switched several open source projects to it, and got a couple companies on to it. It quickly became to me an essential part of the dev stack, and was a great way to get the full dev stack* up and running relatively quickly. * Other than continuous integration, but for me that came later. I worked on a lot of php stuff that could be deployed from source and never really saw the need then. Now I think it's essential and don't work without it.

rajuljain883 8y ago

I don't know why my company use perforce

ebikelaw 8y ago
What’s wrong with it? Perforce is excellent. Git is OK but owes a lot of its popularity to its price.
- pletnes 8y ago
  The fact that branching = copied directories is certainly wrong.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    Branches are virtual copies/views in p4.
    - pletnes 8y ago
      Then some user will copy a directory, check it in, and declare that s/he «has branched the code». Oh, and quietly pull in some other directory, which is clearly not branched. This is just broken IMHO.
JackCh 8y ago
Probably because Perforce scales to truly massive monolithic repos while git traditionally doesn't (the insanity going on at Microsoft notwithstanding.) Personally I feel the best method is using lots of small repos, one for each service or library, that get stitched together by the build system. I know some large tech companies have created such systems and I have experience with one of them working very well (they migrated from perforce). But this is a big change from the monolithic repository model and institutional inertia is very real. (Perforce will eventually start to hit a wall when you get to the point where money won't buy hardware big enough for Perforce to serve your repo fast, but that's a very long way off for most organizations and I believe there are some mitigations for it.)

notaplumber 8y ago

"Opening the Source Repository with Anonymous CVS." Usenix 1999, by Charles D. Cranor (AT&T), Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD). https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.ps https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.ps OpenBSDs involvement here is conveniently missing, arguably GitHub may not have ever existed. Also of note, despite the paper being presented in 1999, AnonCVS was operating as early as 1995. Other projects were still putting tarballs on FTP, no read access to source history.

tootie 8y ago

My first professional coding job used SourceSafe which was lock-based so you couldn't even do concurrent versioning. Everyone had to take turns with the files.

mobilio 8y ago
Mine first was using SourceOff Site (Source Safe extension).
__david__ 8y ago
SourceSafe also allowed you to checkout files in non-exclusive mode which made it more like CVS. It also had a way to share files across different directories, a feature we emulated in CVS by symlinking files in the CVS_ROOT. Also, fun fact: SourceSafe was the first cross platform VCS I used. There were Mac, Unix, and dos/windows versions. Then Microsoft bought it and axed everything except dos/windows. :-(
toolslive 8y ago
Source safe had no real server. So if you faced a difficult merge because your colleague just committed something huge, you could just set your clock back and commit before him, walk over to his desk and tell him he broke the build.
- cakes 8y ago
  Or just delete the source safe files from the share and have everybody in a panic (this happened where I worked in ~2010 for some legacy apps still in source safe...it was an untrained user trying to undo a change).
slobotron 8y ago
Our merge strategy with SourceSafe was to always do a 3 way merge (using Araxis) between: - your latest changes - version of the code before you made changes - latest version of the code on the server So yes, would have 3 full checkouts of the project locally to accomplish this. I guess it boils down to "patch" workflow, except you get to both create and apply the patch yourself. We used a real-world commit token (rubber duck IIRC) to make sure only one person was doing merges at a time... (Tortoise)SVN was an easy sell when we discovered it.

silverlake 8y ago

i work at a big bank that still uses CVS for most of their software. They use SVN for "modern" projects, and only recently started dabbling in git. The place is a tech museum.

kiallmacinnes 8y ago

> So I invite you to come along with me on an exciting journey and spend the next ten minutes of your life learning about a piece of software nobody has used in the last decade. I know of companies who only very recently moved from CVS, and I'd bet there are many that still use it too.. Assertions like this are always dangerous, because inevitably, someone somewhere is still using that tech you think is long dead ;)

MatthewWilkes 8y ago

This is a really interesting perspective for people who haven't grown up with Git. I'd not grokked a distinction between three generations of VCS before and it's strange to me to hear git's bad UI described as something other people think.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gkya 8y ago

A CVS lifesaver that you can put into your shell init file: export CVS_RSH=ssh This defaults to rsh and figuring out that I had to set it like this took me a shameful amount of time (mostly because it produces such and unhelpful error message). I literally couldn't pull the OpenBSD src tree for months... I'm one of the few people who deliberately learned and used CVS (for a while) in recent times. I did not have any public repositories at the time and needed VCS for my configuration and some documents (Org mode mostly), and the model where I could have a central repository on a local directory which I could easily back up was compelling. Then I figured out a filesystem layout where I could back up all my work easily and this became useless, thus I switched to Mercurial. Nowadays I'm considering going just git, because it's what everybody uses, and Magit is a compelling piece of software. I use RCS regularly along with Mercurial and Git nowadays. RCS is good for e.g. when I have a tree where most of the content is pdf files (papers), images, and other binary data that does not really need to be version controlled, together with an Org mode files for notes. I also have a pool of Elisp files which contain the personal bits of my Emacs configuration, and I use RCS on them because their histories are not related to one another. It's no good for projects anymore because it is essentialy a tool used when people used a single computer to develop software to which they connected w/ terminals, so they were all users of the same machine and the code was always in a determined location. One thing people tend to confuse with CVS or SVN is that they think it's a client/server model whereas it's actually a repo/checkout model. The repo is central and can totally reside in a local tree, and checkins from different checkouts go directly to that repo. This is akin to sharing one .git tree between all your checkouts of a single repository.

simula67 8y ago

What would version control look like after Git ? Git famously was not built for monorepo [1] I would like to see sub-tree checkouts, sub-tree history, storing giant asset files in repo ( without the git-lfs hack ), more consistent commands, some sort of API where compilers and build systems can integrate into revision control etc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu.be&t=2595 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu.be...

mmphosis 8y ago
WWgitND, or “What Would git Not Do.

peterwwillis 8y ago

RCS was okay if you were a sysadmin, terrible for everyone else. CVS was okay, but still limited. SVN was more advanced, but buggy as hell. Git is more advanced and less buggy, but over-complicated and unintuitive. Git was actually started in order to complete core functionality and let someone else make the front-end for the VCS. But somewhere along the line people just decided they didn't need a user friendly frontend, and now the core is what people use every day. 13 years later and it's still difficult to use. Unless someone comes up with a really slick universal frontend for it, it's probably time for a new VCS.

cpdt 8y ago
What about Mercurial?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Good question. I never gave it a fair shot, and it used to have some flaws, but maybe it's cleaned those up by now.
- gHosts 8y ago
  Really slick, really easy, really powerful. Combined with Evolution extension.. unbeatable. I have used SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, bzr, git, but hg is by far the least pain and most powerful I have seen.
- bsder 8y ago
  Hush. Please leave everybody on git so that I can have a competitive advantage over them.
dilap 8y ago
the funny thing about git is the conceptual model is clean. DAG of commits, content-addressable file-system. cool. what's insane is the CLI -- a random mismash of commands, all of which do like 4 different only vaguely related things. it's a total clusterfuck.

foreigner 8y ago

This is a really fun article. I started with CVS, graduated to Subversion, and now to Git. It makes me really curious what the next paradigm shift will be! The way I see it the evolution of these version control systems was driven by the precipitously falling price of disk space. CVS only stored a tiny bit of metadata locally so almost every operation required contacting the server. That made using CVS very slow and branching expensive. Subversion stored a whole separate copy of every file locally. This made the critical "show me just my local changes" operation an order of magnitude faster and made branching cheap, at the expense of doubling the disk usage. Git stores the entire history of everything locally (compressed). This makes most operations an order of magnitude faster still, so much faster that some things that were completely impractical with the earlier systems is now routine, and branches are free. What's coming next?

alkonaut 8y ago
I hope pijul will gain traction soon: https://pijul.org https://pijul.org
- dilap 8y ago
  How's it scale w/ repo size? How about large binaries? Those are the biggest pain points I have with git.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    It's possible to check out partially without hacking, so should be in a better place than git in that respect. Other than that I'm not sure if there is any support (similar to LFS). It's also very much in its infancy so performance is likely not a primary focus.
    - dilap 8y ago
      Hopefully not not a consideration, either, though. :-) Definitely a very interesting project. Will have to play around with it a bit.

_jsdw 8y ago

I wonder whether something like pijul (https://pijul.org https://pijul.org) might represent the next step forwards; I am no expert in these things but the patch based approach it takes sounds interesting and potentially very intuitive to work with. I might have to actually give it a go one of these days!

dralley 8y ago
I feel bad for thinking that it's a terrible name, since it's probably a fine name in some other language, and I don't want to be an entitled American English speaker expecting literally everything software related to be in English. And yet, it's a great tool that I suspect that it will never get traction for precisely that reason. The abundance of options enables people to be shallow enough that a silly-sounding name knocks it out of consideration.
- methyl 8y ago
  What's wrong with this name?
  - jedieaston 8y ago
    As an english speaker, I don’t know how to pronounce it. Git, subversion, sourcesafe, they can all be easily pronounced.
- bovine3dom 8y ago
  > a silly-sounding name knocks it out of consideration. I wonder why the same didn't happen with git. It's really rather rude in English.
- jldugger 8y ago
  > And yet, it's a great tool that I suspect that it will never get traction for precisely that reason. Git is like 10x worse and still 'won'.

jedberg 8y ago

I enjoyed skipping the part of the article that explains how CVS worked, because I lived it. :) CVS at the time felt like an amazing upgrade to RCS, just like Git feels like an amazing upgrade to CVS. I wonder though, have we reached the end? If there anything beyond Git? When I used RCS, I would always lament "it would be nice if two of us could work on a file at the same time". When I was using CVS, I'd lament, "It would be nice if two of us could work on a group of files at the same time and merge our changes". But using Git, my only lament is, "I wish this were easier for new developers" and "it would be great if there were a standard workflow". Problem one has been somewhat solved by GitHub/GitLab, and problem two has been solved by some pretty standard git-flow tools. Neither one really demands a new paradigm in VCS though.

jpeloquin 8y ago
> Have we reached the end? If there anything beyond Git? The ability to split and merge repositories as easily as we can split and merge branches might open up some new use patterns. The particular context I'm thinking of is scientific repositories. These tend to grow in size and scope in an unplanned manner. Pieces inevitably need to be split off for a collaboration, to be made public, or because someone is changing institutions and needs to take part of the project with them.

angry_octet 8y ago

Others having mentioned the terror that was Clear Case, but I just want to highlight one of its bad features: everything was stored in a relational DB. And consistency was not guaranteed, so at one point all the code was corrupted. After recovery from the backup, it was retired with vengence, and everything went back to RCS and CVS. When I wanted everyone to switch to Git or Mercurial (~2007) the main questions were about branch merges (MUCH easier in git than CVS) and the reliability of the version storage. Many have now moved back to a centralised model of control (github), even if they have many partial copies. The incredibly RDBMS (non-git) method of managing the meta-data of github systems is very disappointing, but not surprising. If github is 4th gen, then I'm hoping for 5th gen, where all SE meta data is also available as a replicated database, which you can spin up with a local httpd.

ptman 8y ago
You mean like fossil https://fossil-scm.org/ https://fossil-scm.org/ ?
- angry_octet 8y ago
  While there are nice features in fossil (and sqlite is fantastic), but it is not git compatible. If the code and artifacts were kept in git underneath then exchanging code with other repos would be seamless. I don't understand why they rejected keeping tickets as files in a version control system (separate from the code), instead of blobs. It just seems unfriendly to manipulation by other tools. Philosophically, I like that git can be extended with small tools and modules instead of a monolithic executable.
alkonaut 8y ago
Git is pretty agnostic to storage. There are implementations that use RDBMS for storage quite successfully (TFS/VSTS). It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of queries can be significantly faster to perform over git repos stored this way. https://www.richard-banks.org/2014/02/tfs-internals-how-does-tfs-store-git.html https://www.richard-banks.org/2014/02/tfs-internals-how-does...

Ensorceled 8y ago

While CVS may have originated with Grune, I think the CVS everybody is actually familiar with is the version Brian Berliner wrote and maintained for years.

perlgeek 8y ago

I didn't have much contact with CVS, but I used SVN quite a bit. Things I remember from these days: * There was no separation between commit and push. How weird. * "svn log" or "svn blame" would take ages, because it had to tal to the server. * Well-run larger projects had branching guides, because the built-in commands didn't track enough meta data to do merges safely later on * SVN made it trivial to checkout only a subdirectory of a bigger repository (which I still sometimes miss in git), so people often tracked different projects in separate directories of one repository. The only thing I remember about CVS was that to clone something from CVS, you had to know some root directory (this presumably was the webroot), and sourceforge.net didn't show available webroots -- so there were tons of technically "open source" repositories that you still couldn't clone, because the webroot wasn't documented.

opk 8y ago
With cvs, specify just "." and it will checkout all the modules in the CVS repository. That would include CVSROOT which was the module containing hooks. But, yes it was sometimes annoying that the module name wasn't clearly documented.

mathewsanders 8y ago

My first job in the US ~2011 was in design team at monster.com. One of the engineers had made a SVN repository for all our design specs and had cooked up a simple intranet page where the latest version of a design could always be shared by a permanent URL but also a history of all earlier versions. That was my first experience with version control and I remember thinking it was magic. I never found out who made that, so if you’re reading thanks for going the extra mile :)

lokufda222 8y ago

We still use CVS at work ... FML I need a new job!

bsder 8y ago
Um, be glad your company uses source control.

tedunangst 8y ago

> Do you enjoy spending 40 minutes repeatedly running git rebase -i until your local commit history flows like the derivation of a mathematical proof? Hells no.

dilap 8y ago
I enjoy spending a couple minutes squashing, splitting, reordering and tweaking commit messages in GitUp to make my commit history look nice. I do wonder if it's pointless though. Not clear time spent on stuff like that is really worth, vs how often you need to go back and check the history. Maybe it's all just a exercise in OCD.
- kenoyer130 8y ago
  Work on a code base with 40 plus developers and 30-40 commits a day. Having a clean commit history is a must versus "test commit", "fixed that thing", "added" etc.

jancsika 8y ago

> If cvs commit is what you were used to, then I’m sure staging and pushing changes would strike you as a pointless chore. But using only `cvs commit` would be the equivalent of using a single script with git that adds every single thing in the relevant dirs and then blindly commits it. In other words, the people coming from cvs and svn and complaining that git added a step for them were either doing an impeccable job of keeping their source dirs clean at all times, or they were implicitly admitting that they weren't keeping track of what they were adding to their own repos. I would guess there are old projects that fit the latter description. But I know from experience there are old projects that clearly fit the latter.

perlgeek 8y ago
At least with svn it was best practice to run `svn diff` before committing, just like `git add -p` is considered a better practice than `git commit -a`. SVN also allowed you to commit only specific files, so if your working directory wasn't clean, you could mostly still commit just the parts you wanted to commit.

cpeterso 8y ago

In another timeline where git never existed: https://SVNHub.com/ https://SVNHub.com/

kyberias 8y ago

> Did you passive-aggressively rewrite a coworker’s poorly implemented function out of cathartic necessity, never intending for him to know? Too bad, he now thinks you’re a dick. When did it start to be like this? Making code better is a dick move now? Who rewrites stuff passive-aggressively? What does that even mean?

yread 8y ago

I miss bazaar a bit it felt like a saner git and moving to it from SVN and CVS didn't require huge mindset changes

known 8y ago

CVS served its purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_version_control_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_version_control_...

djhworld 8y ago

My professional career started in 2008, but I didn't personally use Git/Github until maybe 2010 or so, but it still took until 2015 for me to be able to use Git/Github at work! Version control system timeline for me has been IBM ClearCase -> CVS -> Perforce -> SVN -> Git The non linear path is from switching jobs/working on legacy projects, but yeah. Git has it's problems, especially on usability, but it's much better than all the others in that list!

rukuu_001 8y ago

Used CVS with my team for years, say what you like, it was rock solid on branches. I was appalled first time I had to pick apart a mess made by SVN on a branch. I’ve made peace with git now, but struggled with the many different ways of getting things done in git.

knorker 8y ago

This post does not do justice to just how awful CVS is. OpenBSD still uses it, and it's the main reason I've only rarely contributed patches. CVS is just that crappy. When I say it's awful I should admit that like FORTRAN it's not bad for its time. But 1986 was 32 years ago. It's not bad because it's old, but it's not 32 years of good either. Commodore 64 was great for its time, but I'm not going to load my version control from a cassette player in 2018.

jbgreer 8y ago

I see a couple of other references so I know I'm not unique, but my first experience of version control was SCCS on SCO Xenix. Then RCS, CVS, SVN and Git. I never used Perforce or ClearCase. Knew some folks who used PVCS and StarTeam and Visual SourceSafe. I played with Bazaar, Monotone, Mercurial and Darcs but not enough to really appreciate them. As an aside, I met Larry McVoy at a Linux convention in 1999 and heard him speak about BitKeeper. Those were interesting times.

ggm 8y ago

RCS was god. I loved RCS. Firstly, unlike SCCS it was head state so fast (SCCS recalced head from the history of change from base) Secondly, because it wasn't CVS all that branch and remote crappe was irrelevant. I never learned CVS. My peers at work hate me because I think branches are something you prune off a rose bush in winter. (I use git now)

dreamcompiler 8y ago

My temporal progression went CVS -> SVN -> Mercurial -> Git. Every one of those was a major upgrade in functionality except the last. I never fought against Mercurial, and I rarely needed to Google "how do you do X with Mercurial" because it was so intuitive. But I spend about 30 minutes a day fighting with or googling git. Git is a horrible mess, but I like everybody else am forced to use it.