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Comment by paul_h | Hacker News Reader

Said to by /u/vfclists on Proggit ..

"folks should realize that ENVY was Smalltalk's Git, way before when before anyone heard of Git"

What was distinctively git-like about it that makes that connection more meaningful than "it was a version control system"?

That is, what made it Smalltalk's git, and not, say, Smalltalk's CVS or ClearCase? The linked-to page suggests that ENVY used a centralized system. (Eg, "The Git model is better for distributed development" and "it had a small process that ran on a server to manage record locking".)

Consider also some of the limitations in ENVY. "You would bring your changes to the machine in the form of (IIRC) a list of RCS-like versions of individual methods, then review and merge them with latest." and "What wasn’t available, was automatic merging".

> what made it Smalltalk's git

Nothing obvious. What made it more than "Smalltalk's CVS" was fine-grained method-level control of versions and configs.

And why not ClearCase, or DSEE before it?

Ah, I think I understand it. I think it comes from a belief that most people treat "git" as a synecdoche or even the entirety of version control systems.

The quote here uses "git" in two ways: 1) "ENVY was Smalltalk's Git" meaning "ENVY was Smalltalk's version control system", and 2) "anyone heard of Git" meaning "anyone heard of the Git system, started by Torvalds."

If so, I think it does a disservice as it reinforces that wrong belief, and is confusing for those who know of other VCSes.

From TFA it sounds like Envy was version control that people didn't find skull-crushingly painful to use, which establishes it as pretty different from CVS or ClearCase.

Heh-heh. After working with RCS, CVS, SCCS, SVN, and Bazaar, I find Mercurial to be a good fit for my model of how to work, while using git drives me batty. Perhaps my skull has been crushed already. :)

FWIW, I and others in my group used CVS for years, after migrating from RCS. We didn't find that difficult.

I didn't get a sense from the article that the people involved found RCS, ClearCase, or CVS that hard to use, only that Envy was a good fit for how they used Smalltalk.

ENVY fit how Smalltalkers used Smalltalk.

Accepting a code change locally, in the usual way, created a new edition in the database. Once editions were versioned and released they would become visible to other developers, and loadable by-default.

I've spent the last 12 years putting a knife in ClearCase whenever I saw it and it's shit branching model.

And I have no idea about ENVY, I've never used it (or SmallTalk). I trust that people that I rate that have used both rate them appropriately.

Yeah. I would say that Monticello was Smalltalk's git. It does the same sort of method-level versioning as ENVY, but it's a true distributed version control system: there's no central server, no locking, and you can always push and pull versions between repositories and merge them regardless of where they came from.

Monticello preceded git by a couple of years, so it took a little while for the Squeak community to embrace it and figure out how to organize its self around DVCS-based development.

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