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by hnfong 841 days ago
> The open-source world was at least 10 years ahead.

I'm not sure it is the win you're suggesting. I had brief stints with CVS and TBH it really sucked.

Luckily when I started coding seriously (which coincided with my first job), SVN just reached 1.0 and it was OK. This was 2004 already.

IMHO, the whole situation was fixed only after Linus decided he had enough of the crap and wrote his own.
4 comments
ferd 841 days ago
CVS certainly sucked by today's standards, and SVN was indeed a big improvement, and Git much more so.

All I wanted to stress is that the "lock-before-you-can-touch" approach was the norm in the enterprise world at the time. IMHO, this fact alone made SVN (even CVS) better than all the commercial products which I used at the time.

When some of the "enterprise" world started adopting SVN and commercial products started relaxing the locking mandate, the open-source world was already embarked on the decentralized model (git, darcs, arch, mercurial, etc).

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hermitdev 841 days ago
I used ClearCase quite a bit (and other (ir)Rational tools) at a previous job. It sucked pretty hard. But, it didn't _require_ you to lock files. It _strongly encouraged_ you to, and made working with hijacked files a pain in the ass, though. In practice, this is largely worked around with branches, though. And, branches from branches... Kind of mimicking the distributed workflow we know with git with more branches.

But, yeah, ClearCase sucked pretty hard and was frustratingly slow. Also, too easy to miss adding files to source control and really annoying interface to _find_ view-private files. 0/10, would not use again unless I had a gun to my head.

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pmeunier 841 days ago
At the time we thought our tools were good, and really meant it.

Now it's different, we think our new tools are good, and we really mean it. But it's different.

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troupe 841 days ago
> I'm not sure it is the win you're suggesting. I had brief stints with CVS and TBH it really sucked.

What had you used that was better? CVS seemed like quite a step forward compared to RCS and the other available options.

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hnfong 841 days ago
The point I was originally trying to make was that they all sucked before SVN came out.

Especially when compared with the options we have now, I think it's slightly misleading to say OSS solutions were in any real way better back then...

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okr 841 days ago
Hello Bitkeeper, hello Mercurial!
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