To answer your actual question, it is of course a riff on a TV ad for a cockroach trap in the 1980s. The sentiment of the quote, as I saw it (it's possible I was the one who added it to the fortunes file after ken saw the SCCS burble at the top of some file from USG and laughed), was primarily a reaction to the taint it added to the previously annotation-free top of the file. It was also a response to the march of corporate code management stepping into the research world, or perhaps the hacker world. It's a philosophical thing, a feeling, not an argument. It all seems so quaint now. -rob On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 8:22 AM Rob Pike wrote: > According to the Unix room fortunes file, the actual quote is > > SCCS: the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out. > Ken Thompson > > On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 3:52 AM Marc Rochkind wrote: > >> IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering has asked me to write a >> retrospective on the influence of SCCS over the last 50 years, as my SCCS >> paper was published in 1975. They consider it one of the most influential >> papers from TSE's first decade. >> >> There's a funny quote from Ken Thompson that circulates from time-to-time: >> >> "SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!" >> >> But nobody seems to know what it means exactly. As part of my research, I >> asked Ken what the quote meant, sunce I wanted to include it. He explained >> that it refers to SCCS storing binary data in its repository file, >> preventing UNIX text tools from operating on the file. >> >> Of course, this is only one of SCCS's many weaknesses. If you have >> anything funny about any of the others, post it here. I already have all >> the boring usual stuff (e.g., long-term locks, file-oriented, no merging). >> >> Marc Rochkind >> mrochkind.com >> >> >> >> >>