Re: [TUHS] SCCS

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Hello.

Please excuse the late reply, your message (and many more) landed
in the spam folder, i have adjusted the subject again.

Larry McVoy wrote in <20190914015517.GD12480@mcvoy.com>:
 |On Sat, Sep 14, 2019 at 01:03:12AM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> He is as convinced from SCCS and its interleaved deltas as you
 |> are, but he works on extending the plain original SCCS, which is
 |> pretty smaller; his presentation from the "Chemnitzer Linux Tage
 |> 2012" (linux days of former Karl-Marx-Stadt) [1] talks about this
 |> and also prominently mentions BitKeeper:
 |> 
 |>   . All modern distributed OSS version control systems base upon
 |>     BitKeeper in the end.
 |
 |Sort of.  Monotone, Darcs, and one other one I can't remember did not
 |draw from BitKeeper.  Mercurial, Git, and the Australian one that I
 |can't remember definitely do.
 |
 |>   . BitKeeper bases upon the ideas of TeamWare.
 |
 |Only in that I am the primary author of both.  It does support the idea
 |that SCCS is the basis for both, though Teamware used the real SCCS and
 |I rewrote SCCS from scratch and then extended it quite a bit.  BitKeeper's
 |SCCS tracks a lot more than SCCS does, pathnames, permissions, hostnames,
 |etc.

Regarding the technical background Jörg mentions US Patent 5481722
on merging deltas of source code control for computer software
development that Glenn Skinner of Sun holds.

 |>   . TeamWare bases upon the ideas of NSE.
 |
 |That's absolutely false.  TeamWare, which is the productized version
 |of NSElite, which I wrote all of, was a reaction to how absolute shiite
 |NSE was.  I had friends in the Sun kernel group that quit because they
 |were forced to use NSE.  It was awful.  I got into source management 
 |because I was well known at Sun as the guy that could fix performance
 |problems so I was asked to look at NSE.  One look told me that I couldn't
 |fix NSE but the source management problem space needed some help.
 |
 |>   . NSE is a frontend to SCCS.
 |
 |That's true.
 |
 |>   . Therewith all modern systems ultimately base upon SCCS.
 |
 |That is a big stretch, it's just not true.  I love the SCCS file 
 |format but to say all modern systems are based on SCCS is 100%
 |false.  BitKeeper is.  That's it.
 |
 |>   . Distributed operate TeamWare, BitKeeper, git, Mercurial.
 |
 |Git and Mercurial were going for append only data structures. 
 |That's not SCCS.
 |
 |All this comes from Jorg, isn't he the guy who has a track record of
 |being on the outside of Sun and trying to argue with me about what Sun
 |was doing when I was a well known guy in the most important group at Sun,
 |the kernel group.  If so, I'd salt his stuff heavily.

This is the Jörg Schilling with whom you have had a dispute on
this list, yes.  But i do not share this track record of yours.
To me he is a person who distributed parts of my free software
infrastructure when that was much smaller than today, and enabled
me to burn CDs, which was a thing in the ninetees.  And to the
best of my knowledge he was an actor behind the berliOS open
source hub, which lost its financial support alongside other
German software projects (afaik) in the second half of the 2000's,
and therefore rebased its users to Sourceforge.  And more.

I do not know about Sun let alone its internals, but i know for
sure he worked with Sun code already in the 80s, and it seems he
worked for a company who was working with Sun code very tightly.
Since he is from Berlin where all the friendly communicative
people come from it seems not unlikely that he got good hooks here
and there, so why not.

One thing he says, and which is an interesting part of this
thread, is

  Die Behauptung von Eric Allman Tichy hätte SCCS Version
  1 verwendet kann ich nicht glauben, denn die Veröffentlichungen
  von Tichy sind von 1982 und SCCS war seit Februar 1977 auf der
  Version 4. SCCS Version 3 hatte übrigens noch ein binäres
  Historyformat.

  The statement of Eric Allman that Tichy used SCCS version
  1 i cannot believe, because Tichy's releases are from 1982, and
  SCCS version 4 was released as earyl as February 1977.  SCCS
  version 3 used a binary history format, by the way.

That should have addressed Eric Allman, but the longer i use email
in the public space the more i like that pub-like feeling.  (And
not going to add that it reminds me of my childhood, where i was
a boy under elder seasoned men _also_.)

 |I think he means well but is a little out there.  Though some people
 |might say the same about me.

I also think he means well.  The rest i do not know about,
Larry McVoy.  I am a Buddhist also, and the Austrian Emperor even
wanted to pardon also a woman who i think tortured and killed her
own child, and the death penalty came back only due to massive
pressure from the population.  Jörg in turn says, i cite (and
translate a bit loose), "Larry is good, but regarding himself
a little bit too offensive".  Without meaning any harm i think
this can well be said, and is a key for making it in New York,
without ever having been there.  Bob Dylan even went electric!

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)