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Comment by adamcw | Hacker News Reader

As I'm not familiar with those, I have to ask: did you mean CVS and SVN?

Ack. I'm damn sorry, I just had a fully botched prod-update from hell and I'm on tilt.

Yes. CVS and SVN. The old and ugly ones.

Hahah. Nothing to be sorry for, I was just curious. There are enough source systems out there, I wouldn't be surprised if they were a few I hadn't heard of.

You want old, ugly, slow, pain-in-the-ass and proprietary,? Try ClearCase. Expensive. Drain on productivity (all commits were individual file based, meaning it was extraordinarily easy to miss a change; also had no concept of an ignore, so really easy to miss adding a new file). Also, very. fucking. slow. A moderately sized project (or VOB in clearcase terminology) could take an hour to update. I've probably lost a year of my life waiting for clearcase to complete. Also, it had a habit of just royally fucking up even trivial merges (dropping braces in C++ code, for example, or ignoring whitespace changes in python code for another).

I've never used Clearcase, but I worked for Sun around 2000 and one of the things I did was analysing kernel dumps of Solaris.

If we saw the Clearcase kernel module you can be sure that that was going to be the root cause of the crash. That thing seemed to really terrible, and it wouldn't surprise me if the rest of the product was as bad.

I don't know if things have changed now, but to use Clearcase you needed a kernel module that provided a special filesystem that you did your work against.

> to use Clearcase you needed a kernel module that provided a special filesystem that you did your work against.

That... Augh, that's actually kind of a good idea, even if it was before its time. But FFS...

The idea is not terrible, but when the kernel module is so unstable it brings down the build machines with a kernel panic, I'd say the execution was somewhat lacking.

> CVS and SVN. The old and ugly ones.

In their respective times they were a big improvement. I believe CVS was the first client/server revision control system (why that feature was added was a horror story)

Never had a problem with SVN personally either. OpenBSD still uses CVS, for an entire operating system.

Which version control you use matters a lot less than having a sane development process.

Very much so. I remember jumping from RCS to CVS and it was a very positive change.

(RCS only worked on single files, moving to CVS allowed you to maintain a tree. Before RCS I was using SCCS!)

See also RCS - the revision control system you discover when you mistype vi. (This frequently happened to people at school back in the SunOS/Solaris days.)

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