[cvsnt] 20 years of CVS

[Michael Wojcik]

> From: cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org 
> [mailto:cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Barrett
> Sent: Monday, 03 July, 2006 04:36
> 
> Congratulations to the CVS project - 20 year anniversary today!
> 
> Dick Grune published the first version of the CVS versioning 
> system on the July 3, 1986 - and many talented individuals have 
> continued to contribute to the project for twenty years 
> ensuring it has become a very versatile basis for CM systems, 
> including our own CVSNT and CVS Suite.

When I started using RCS for change control at IBM in 1989, three years
after CVS first appeared, the people I worked with were just starting to
make the transition from SCCS.  RCS was still the Next Big Thing at a
lot of organizations.

Polytron's PVCS, essentially an RCS clone with some GUI front-end
tooling (which may not have been in the first version; I didn't start
using it until several years later), also came out in the late 1980s,
but it ignored the CVS concurrent-change model in favor of the RCS
lock-edit-commit one.

I don't think I even heard of CVS until sometime in the mid 1990s.

My point?  SCM systems are relatively long-lived applications.
Subversion certain has its fans, but I expect CVS has a long life ahead
of it yet; and I, for one, haven't seen any compelling reason to switch.

> For anyone interested - the original posting by Dick is 
> available in the Google Groups archive here:

I love that CVS (though not the RCS engine) is actually included in the
announcement itself, as a shar archive.  Now there's an installer
technology: no black boxes, trivial to inspect and fix if something goes
wrong, and compact enough to send over a slow dial-up link.

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Principal Software Systems Developer, Micro Focus