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Comment by dragonshed | Hacker News Reader

ClearCase was expensive, unless you pirated it.

As far as other opensource go to solutions, CVS and SVN, branching in them was nontrivial. Many folks preferred zipped folders to using CVS/SVN.

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Linus Torvalds famously preferred tarballs over CVS.

For further discussion, keep in mind that thanks to competition from git etc, modern svn is substantially more bearable than it used to be before distributed version control systems became popular.

What is so hard about creating a branch in CVS and SVN?

My first SCM was RCS and have used most of them since then.

Even with all this experience I rather just redo my local devenv than take a PhD degree in git implementation to fix repo state.

You don't remember when your CVS admin would send out the email announcing the repo would be frozen for the next 48 hours so a branch could be created for the golden master? I don't know why it was such an onerous task but the disruption creating a branch would cause was significant given you would only commit every few weeks when all your changes were ready. Compared to modern VCSes it was like having no VCS at all.

No, because creating a CVS branch was relatively easy.

https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/cvs-branches.html

Looks like you had a lousy IT.

You know what happened when you did that one simple command that every sysadmin hates? It copies all of the thousands of files containing all the millions of lines of production code from spinning rust-coated glass to spinning rust-coated glass on system that run at hundreds of megahertz. If anyone accidentally checks in a change between when the copy starts and when it ends, the entire source history going back years gets horribly and irretrievably corrupted and you need to spend a couple of days restoring everything from backup, which is inevitably rust-coated mylar tape to rust-coated spinning glass disks, rebuilding indexes as you go. That is assuming the restore from backup actually works, which is rarely if ever tested and you know full well even if it is tested that's the day you experience not one but multiple disk failures probably because of all the intense activity. Meanwhile you lost your slot at the manufacturing facility in Taiwan because your golden master wasn't delivered in the brief window required and they have already retooled the line for another customer. Maybe you can recover from the financial loss, or maybe your sysadmin just takes the reasonable precaution of freezing access to the CVS repo for the days the branch takes to create, and schedules it over a weekend to minimize downtime.

You have to wonder why, twenty five years ago, the sysadmin didn't just synch the entire network to the cloud through his iPhone. That, of course, would just show how none of was is your lived experience.

Really lousy IT.

But SVN had cheap and quick branching.

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