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Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today
- Aardwolf 8y agoThe good news is that all commit times fit in the unix timestamp which started in 1970 :)
- ComputerGuru 8y agoI mean, that's not a coincidence.
- eclipxe 8y agothatsthejoke.jpg
- cobbzilla 8y agoAs a piece of history and source for research, this is simply amazing. They show an example of `git blame` on `pipe.c` that includes names like Ken Thompson and Bill Joy; pretty cool.
- JdeBP 8y agoIt is important to realize that it does have some gaping holes, though. For example: I was recently unable to unearth from it exactly when the BSD ps command changed to using getopt() and minus signs for arguments. The entire history of the FreeBSD repository back to the original 4.4BSD commits has ps using getopt(), and minus signs have been the only option syntax documented in the ps(1) manual page for all of that time, too. * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.c?revision=1556&view=markup#l133 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.c?revision=15... * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.1?revision=1556&view=markup#l42 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.1?revision=15... This repository, alas, does not yield very much further information.
- JdeBP 8y agoFor the curious: The furthest back that I have managed to trace it so far is 1986, using Usenet archives. A patch that was posted to mod.sources on 1986-08-01 (v06i083, Michael A. Callahan) apparently references getopt() argument parsing and mentions "ps -U", implying that 4.2 BSD ps was using getopt() by then. (Although there's no direct mention of getopt and this may be wrong.) * https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mod.sources/H-shkbdVIbs/VJUIw_L2hb8J https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mod.sources/H-shkbdVIbs/VJUI...
- ianbooker 8y agoAs linked in the repository: https://youtu.be/S7JB0mhrGCQ https://youtu.be/S7JB0mhrGCQ For this alone, all the work paid off. On a more serious side, I wonder what we can learn from this data. Its not a question for the field of computational social science, but social science of computation!
- emidln 8y agoIt would be interesting to do this for one of the open source Solaris distros and for plan9 to then compare the three.
- zeckalpha 8y agoIt’s missing those specifically, but http://fxr.watson.org http://fxr.watson.org has quite a few kernels
- beckler 8y agoGit wasn't released until 2005, so what did they use before then? I know it says they pulled the history from 24 snapshots.
- BuildTheRobots 8y agoiirc, Linux used to live inside of BitKeeper which was a paid for solution. I believe Linus wrote git as a replacement because he got fed up with the commercial licensing (even though they gave free copies to linux devs). Edit: this doesn't actually answer your question of where unix used to live, rather than linux though....
- brazzy 8y ago> I believe Linus wrote git as a replacement because he got fed up with the commercial licensing (even though they gave free copies to linux devs). No - BitKeeper revoked the free license because some guy (unrelated to Linux) wrote a client that reverse engineered more features than BitKeeper liked. And Linux actually used BitKeeper only between 2002 and 2005; prior to that time, it did not use a source control system at all.
- self_awareness 8y agoThe BitKeeper reverse engineering is a fun story to read: https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/ https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/ (and short!)
- black-tea 8y agoThey did use a system---tarballs and patches---but it was just a socially constructed system rather than rigorously enforced using software. Linus has often said he would have rather gone back to that system rather than use CVS or SVN.
- cryptonector 8y agoFortunately instead he created Git. I'm a fan of Git, though I'm aware many aren't.
- pjc50 8y agoLinked from the README is the tooling: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make
- mci 8y agoThe repository unearthed the long lost source code of the original style and diction tools by Lorinda Cherry: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-4_1_snap-Snapshot-Development/.ref-BSD-4/usr/src/cmd/diction https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-4_1... GNU style and diction are their faint copies.
- self_awareness 8y agohttps://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/386BSD-0.0-Snapshot-Development/usr/src/sbin/reboot/reboot.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/386BSD-... void dingdong() { /* RRRIIINNNGGG RRRIIINNNGGG */ } setalarm(n) int n; { signal(SIGALRM, dingdong); alarm(n); } :)
- saghm 8y agoI haven't written C in a bit, so I'm a little confused about the second part of that snippet; is `setalarm` a macro? It doesn't look like a function declaration, as there's no return type, and the presence of `int n;` after `setalarm(n)` makes it seem like it would be shadowing `n` if `n` were a parameter rather than an argument (not to mention the fact that `int n;` is outside of the braces. Given that `setalarm` doesn't seem to be declared/defined anywhere in that file, can anyone who's a bit more familiar with the codebase point out to me what's going on here?
- jcelerier 8y agoit's pre-ANSI C function definition
- JdeBP 8y agoThere was a time when "I haven't written C in a bit" was a reason for immediately recognizing code such as this. (-:
- ktpsns 8y agoInterestingly, this way of function definitions is "still" the way subroutines/functions are defined in (modern/all time) Fortran (if one ignores the syntactic differences). Also, at "old" C, declarations only may come at the beginning of a block -- just as it still is with Fortran. Out of curiosity, is there any reason for the similiarity?
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- JdeBP 8y agoFor some other github accounts, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/320133/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/320133/5132 .
- e40 8y agoThe main product I work on started in RCS, moved to CVS then to git. I have continuous history going back to 1988.
- atm0sphere 8y agoWhat is it?
- e40 8y agoClosed source language product, though parts are open source, like this: https://github.com/franzinc/clim2 https://github.com/franzinc/clim2 First commit 1991.
- nes350 8y agoFound it interesting someone has created a GitHub account for Dennis Ritchie: https://github.com/dmr-1941-2011 https://github.com/dmr-1941-2011 Note how the year selector on the right of "Contribution activity" is broken - seems it can't fit 1970-2019. Same happens with Ken Thompson's profile.
- notpeter 8y ago> This repository will be often automatically regenerated from scratch, so this is not a place to make contributions. To ensure replicability its users are encouraged to fork it or archive it. I've run into this with source code archeology projects. Git is ill-suited to integrating newly discovered pre-history/missing intermediary history steps. Any new historical change, out of necessity, alters all subsequent commit hashes. This means collaboration and permalinks can't happen like with "normal" Git repos. Does anyone know of any tooling or an alternate vcs which has the ability to integrate new pre-history or alternate history (e.g. original branch commits alongside a squash and merge commit) without requiring completely breaking/re-writing the entire tree?
- Rondom 8y agoGit has a mechanism to declare two commits equal and replace one with the other: man git-replace This comes at the cost of having intentionally multiple histories and is not well-suited for complicate cases, but for the common case of "we want to stitch this old CVS-history to this commit", it does a good job. Usability-wise, replace refs are not cloned automatically and some web-based tools lack support for it.
- yebyen 8y agoYou can also use the 'magic empty tree object' to make your repo more amenable to joining disparate histories of other trees. It requires both the source and destination repo to abide by this practice, but I do this on all of my repos... Immediately after `git init`, do `git commit --allow-empty -m"initial empty commit"`. Now you have an empty commit, and any other repo which has this empty commit has some history in common with your repo. The SHA-1 hash is well-known and there are plenty of articles you can find about it, if you search for 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904 Here's one for example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9765453/is-gits-semi-secret-empty-tree-object-reliable-and-why-is-there-not-a-symbolic https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9765453/is-gits-semi-sec... I'm not sure this helps for projects which have a shared development history, but not a shared commit history. But within an organization, where you have projects which may split and/or merge, it can help to bridge some gaps.
- caprese 8y agoI wish someone would do this for legal code, starting with federal law with hashes for all representatives (way I envision it is that their committees being their own branches, along with the chambers of congress even though its not part of the git protocol, the GUI element of the Pull Request feature could have continuous integration that showed when a threshold of votes were passed to get something into to the next branch like out of committee and onto the floor then after whichever path was taken to get something codified into law, it is merged into the master branch where the agencies have their own process to update the code of federal regulations)
- amyjess 8y ago> even though its not part of the git protocol, the GUI element of the Pull Request feature could have continuous integration that showed when a threshold of votes were passed to get something into to the next branch like out of committee and onto the floor I'm wondering if Fossil would be more suited to this than Git.
- nukeop 8y agoI can't believe they used git even in the 70s and they managed to do it all in just 4 commits. Incredible engineers and astounding geniuses.
- cagataygurturk 8y agoLegacy code.