An Illustrated Version Control Timeline 244
rocket22 writes "Most software developers are supposed to be using the latest in tech and see themselves as living on the edge of software innovation. But, are they aware of how old some of the tools they use on a daily basis are? There are teams out there developing iPad software and checking in code inside arcane CVS repositories. Aren't we in the 21st century, the age of distributed version control? The blog post goes through some of the most important version control systems on the last three decades and while it doesn't try to come up with an extremely detailed thesis, it does a good job creating a catalog of some of the most widely spread or technologically relevant SCMs."
Re:My god, it's full of troll. (Score:1, Informative)
It's also an advertisement. Sigh.
SCCS? (Score:1, Informative)
SCCS predates RCS. Why isn't it on the list?
Welcome to hell (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My god, it's full of troll. (Score:2, Informative)
I agree, subversion is not terrible. However, after getting a laptop, I definitely see the advantages of a DVCS. git's not the friendliest of tools, but regardless of the reason, there's a lot of moment out there and supporting tools, so I prefer using git as my DVCS system.
In addition, with git, I also have gotten extremely comfortable with creating a new local branch for any separate task I want to do. This makes my commits much cleaner and virtually eliminates the problem I had with svn where I was working on a feature then got interrupted with a high priority bug.
The git-svn bridge also comes in extremely handy, and is a great way to get the benefits of both worlds.
I have to say though, that I think git not handling directories as real objects is a big step backwards. And Subversion's use of metadatas can also be pretty handy sometimes.
Re:Source control is so political (Score:3, Informative)
P.S.
- One company used their own internal source control. That was by far the worst.
- All the small companies and contracts used either perforce or svn.
Just pointing this out since I meant to contrast the relationship between company size and tools.
They're selling a VCS (Score:3, Informative)
It's a nice timeline of some key milestones but it's worth noting that they're advertising something, it'd be nice if that had been clearer from the article.
Also, I was disappointed not to see GNU arch / tla get a mention as I think they might have been first to decentralised operation. They were most certainly one of the first and as such I suspect they had a certain amount of influence on those that followed, even though the user experience was reputed to be lacking from what I heard (actually, I thought that bzr evolved out of it too, so it may also have a more direct connection with the modern-day main players)
FRAUD ALERT! (Score:1, Informative)
Was a Slashdot editor paid to run this story? Is it Slashdot company policy to allow sneaky advertising???
You can judge a company's products by its morals: Oracle [cnet.com], Microsoft (huge hassles with products being unfinished), AOL (misleading accounting), and Enron (misleading accounting) are examples that come to mind.
Re:VSS All the Way (Score:2, Informative)
If only PHB's had a clue, we're forced to use Visual Source Safe at work. I would claim it a legacy system but they just put it in a couple of monthes ago. I think any version control is better than nothing, but I'm not sure Visual Source Safe beats the file system's snap shots that are automatically created.
For the love of god, if you have to use MS software, show the PHB Team Foundation Server. It does a lot more than source control and is superior in every way to VSS. If you have MSDN then it might even be free (beer).
Re:Subversion branching and merging (Score:1, Informative)
oh noes! so hard, so complex! wait, no! you just didnt bother to learn the tool