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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

In a 24-year-old version control system.

edit: Wow, not sure what's offensive here...

I posted this in the reddit thread today, after being part of a larger discussion last week.

Theo de Raadt co-created AnonCVS back in 1995/1996. He and Chuck Cranor from AT&T Labs Research published a paper in 1999 about it.

OpenBSD was the first open source project to make access to their source repository public to non-developers, before AnonCVS you needed commit access to review history, annotations and even checkout. OpenBSD had a read-only CVS tree even before their website was created in 1996.

There are no known prior cited examples of a project providing this level of transparency to the development process, most open source projects at the time only provided "snapshots" of development in the form of compressed source directory tarballs, excluding RCS files. SUP and FreeBSD's ctm(1) only let you merge "current" remote changes to a local non-versioned directory.

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf

And here's an additional historical tidbit relating to FreeBSD and AnonCVS: https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/517714611089719296

You're probably getting downvoted because a lot of OpenBSD threads derail into fruitless discussions of their use of CVS.

People here downvote what they don't like

I'm well aware of that, the question is why don't they? I found it a neat aspect that an long-lived bug with a long-lived PR is in a long-lived VCS.

You're single line comment might have appeared dismissive of the version control used by the OpenBSD people, especially because it's something that often comes up in threads about BSD.

Threads involving OpenBSD can involve fierce downvoting so it's probably a good idea to be clear about what you're saying.

I think all of this could be easily avoided if HN stopped allowing people to try and silence valid comments that they happen to disagree with.

The site is now more political than ever and this just seems to fuel the "silence what you don't agree with" type voting, which I don't think is a good thing.

Topic aside, the original comment was ambiguous. Is it a middlebrow dismissal ("Pfft, their VCS is two dozen years old ..."), or is it an expression of admiration ("Wow, it's pretty amazing that their version control system has stood the test of time, even when the rest of the world seems to be moving towards git!")?

The pythonic tendency towards being explicit about what we mean to say serves us well even in prose. :-) I agree with the OP, it's a pretty neat engineering feat. I think the downvotes would likely have been avoided had that admiration been more clearly stated.

or what they consider irrelevant or noise.

That's only true in the first hour or two or a comment's existence. If you wait until most active HNers have had a chance to weigh in, it's almost always only the content-free, Reddit-style (eg., "that's true!") or blatantly offensive comments that are downvoted below 0.

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