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Comment by dshacker | Hacker News Reader

I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.

We used it. We knew no better. It was different then, you might not hear about alternatives unless you went looking for them. Source Safe was integrated with Visual Studio so was an obvious choice for small teams.

Get this; if you wanted to change a file you had to check it out. It was then locked and no-one else could change it. Files were literally read only on your machine unless you checked them out. The 'one at a time please' approach to Source Control (the other approach being 'lets figure out how to merge this later')

I remember a big commercial SCM at the time that had this as an option, when you wanted to make sure you wouldn’t need to merge. Can’t remember what it was called, you could “sync to file system” a bit like dropbox and it required teams of full time admins to build releases and cut branches and stuff . Think it was bought by IBM?

I guess you’re talking about Rational Rose? I had the misfortune of using that at my first industry job (fintech in 2004).

Rose is a UML modeling tool

Oops, it was ClearCase that was Rational’s SCM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DevOps_Code_ClearCase

ClearCase?

Which is exactly how CVS (and its predecessors RCS and SCCS) worked.

They were file based revision control, not repository based.

SVN added folders like trunk/branches/tags that overlaid the file based versioning by basically creating copies of the files under each folder.

Which is why branch creation/merging was such a complicated process, because if any of the files didn't merge, you had a half merged branch source and a half merged branch destination that you had to roll back.

CVS was called the “concurrent version system” because it did not lock files on checkout. Nor did svn. Perforce does.

True dat, my mistake. That was its major feature, from memory though it still used the same reversed diff file format?

Perforce does not lock files on checkout unless you have the file specifically configured to enforce exclusive locking in the file's metadata or depot typemap.

I am quite sure that you can edit files in an svn repo to your heart’s content regardless of whether anyone else is editing them on their machine at the same time.

Yep, svn has a lock feature but it is opt-in per file (possibly filetype?)

A pretty good tradeoff, because you can set it on complex structured files (e.g. PSDs and the like) to avoid the ballache of getting a conflict in an unmergeable file but it does not block code edition.

And importantly anyone can steal locks by default. So a colleague forgetting to unlock and going on holidays does not require finding a repo admin.

The lock approach is still used in IC design for some of the Cadence/Synopsis data files which are unmergable binaries. Not precisely sure of the details but I've heard it from other parts of the org.

A lot of engineering is the same. You cannot diff and merge CAD files, so you lock them.

Similar in video game shops - lots of binary files, or even huge (non-editable by human) text ones.

The file lock was a fun feature when a developer forgot to unlock it and went on holidays. Don't forget the black hole feature that made files randomly disappear for no reason. It may have been the worst piece of software I have ever used.

Lucky you. Definitely one of the worst tools I’ve had the displeasure of working with. Made worse by people building on top of it for some insane reason.

It was at least a little better than CVS, but with SVN available at the same time, never understood the mentality of the offices that I worked at using Source Safe instead of SVN.

> It was at least a little better than CVS

Highly debatable.

CVS has a horrendous UI, but didn’t have a tendency to corrupt itself at the drop of a hat and didn’t require locking files to edit them by default (and then require a repository admin to come in and unlock files when a colleague went on holidays with files checked out). Also didn’t require shared write access to an SMB share (one of the reasons it corrupted itself so regularly).

Uhh, CVS definitely regularly corrupted itself. I nearly lost my senior research thesis in undergrad because of it. The only thing that saved me was understanding professors and the fact that I could drive back home to my parents' house and get back to my review in 30 minutes, where I had a good copy of my code I could put on an Iomega Zip disk from my desktop instead of the corrupted copy we couldn't pull from CVS in the CS lab.

Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system.

It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe.

> Agreed. It had a funny habit of corrupting its own data store also. That's absolutely what you want in a source control system.

I still ‘member articles calling it a source destruction system. Good times.

> It sucked; but honestly, not using anything is even worse than SourceSafe.

There have always been alternatives. And even when you didn’t use anything, at least you knew what to expect. Files didn’t magically disappear from old tarballs.

I remember when we migrated from Visual Source Safe to TFS at my place of work. I was in charge of the migration and we hit errors and opened a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support. The ticket ended up being assigned to one of creators of Source Safe who replied "What you are seeing is not possible". He did manage to solve it in the end after a lot of head scratching.

It was pretty janky. We used it in the gamedev world in the 90s once the migration to Visual C started.

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