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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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