5 ms·
The cited RCS paper is actually somewhat contentious among Unix greybeards. They claim the paper compared RCS against an obsolete version of SCCS. Supposedly a
by pdw 3y ago
The cited RCS paper is actually somewhat contentious among Unix greybeards. They claim the paper compared RCS against an obsolete version of SCCS. Supposedly a contemporary SCCS would have easily outperformed RCS.
Of course, RCS was freely available, while SCCS needed to be licensed from Bell Labs, so RCS was much more widely used.
- somnium_sn 3y agoPost author her! Super interesting! I heard rumors about it! Do you know if that was just a matter of implementation or a matter of data structure usage? In my mind, the RCS approach makes more sense for common operations such as checking out the most recent version, particularly if history is deep. (Writing would still be same, given the most recent version is in top in RCS (and not just append only). Would love to get more flavor on the his, and happy to amend the post with more information!
- pdw 3y agoI don't have any personal knowledge, but see e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-September/018472.html https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-September/018472.ht...
- somnium_sn 3y agoOh this thread is gold! Thank you!
- bch 3y agoI’ve been waiting to see ‘luckydude weigh in, but here he is by proxy. When some time ago he and I talked about this (here, or on #Tcl), the thing I recall most from our conversation is “Tichy pulled the wool over our eyes.”