[dn3500]

There were several proprietary systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The one I remember was DSEE from Apollo Computer. It was integrated with the file system such that commits and branches worked like zfs snapshots. You could just "cd" to whatever tag, branch, or individual commit you wanted. No checkouts required. Very cool, I wish we still had that today. DSEE was spun off as Clearcase, acquired by IBM, then I don't know what happened to it after that.

[ktpsns]

That sounds awesome. A bit like plan9 philosophy "everything is a file". I wonder whether one could implement something like this with fuse+git (gitfs doesnt allow this, cf https://gitfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mount_options/)

[IshKebab]

That would be very easy to do with FUSE. I would be amazed if it hasn't been done.

I doubt it's really that useful though - it would be difficult to make the filesystem mutable, which means anything that puts caches or build files in the tree (which is most things) wouldn't work.

I did a very quick search. First result: https://github.com/csutorasa/git-fuse

[myaccountonhn]

With a thin layer of tooling, you could probably build a zfs CVS very easily. There's zfs send and each version is available under .zfs so you could use the patch/diff tool to see different versions and restore to older versions.

[chuckadams]

ClearCase is wonderful for users when it's working, but I've never seen a CC repo that didn't have a dedicated admin working full-time to keep it from falling over.

[twic]

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe worked like this, but badly.

[wvhulle]

Sounds like the “jj edit” command.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Its not

[wvhulle]

Sorry I was a bit short. I meant the way “cd”-ing was described in the comment sounds a lot like how I use “jj edit” of JJ VCS. Not the same thing, but maybe it’s close to the ideal VCS user experience you were describing?