I think a lot of people who've only learned programming in the last 10 years or so don't realize that Git, and even more so the large-scale popularity of Git, is actually pretty new. A lot of programming happened before Git was created, and before it became mature and popular enough to be the default for everyone.
Many of these earlier systems sound terrible and hacky to us, but they were the best that was available at the time. Systems to "lock" files you were working on were pretty common because basically nobody did merges well. Most of them were based on having a server to manage the whole thing too, so they were only really common in corporations and larger and more mature hobbyist teams - this was also before you could spin up a cloud server for most things with a few keystrokes and $5 a month. It's low-effort to spin up a local Git repo to track your work on a tiny personal project, but nobody's going to set up a CVS server for that.
Anybody remember Joel On Software's 12 Steps [0], written in the year 2000, 5 years before the Git project was started? Where "use source control" is Step 1? There's a reason why that's there - at the time it was written, source control was clunky and a pain in the ass to set up, so a lot of smaller companies or ones with less mature development teams never got around to it.
I may be getting a little "old man yells at clouds" here, but be really thankful that Git is FOSS, ubiquitous, works great for 98% of projects, and is superlatively awesome compared to everything that came before it.
I use CVS, RCS and Subversion on my personal projects for several years before I learned git. I don’t remember any of them being a pain to setup for small projects and Sourceforge provided free CVS hosting for small projects.
I started with Rational Clearcase, which I interacted with via Eclipse, and I remember that you did have to lock a file to make changes to it... pretty sure there was no merge capability (but maybe I was just too junior to know stuff like that, it was definitely not something you would do as a matter of routine, like we do now with git). Someone leaving for vacation and forgetting to unlock a file could be a huge pain in the ass.
After that I used Subversion via TortoiseSVN for Windows, which was quite nice to use, though I don't really remember much of the details... I do remember asking myself why everyone was moving to git when "perfectly good" source control already existed, but after 10+ years on Git, I think I was wrong and we did need it, we just didn't know it yet.
Rational Clearcase is a disaster but you could do merges.
The fun/frustrating part was getting branching and "views" correct.
I worked at an organization on this side of the century where it was one person's full-time job to handle merging code from different teams. The same organization didn't actually use raw Clearcase either -- it was wrapped in hundreds-of-thousands-of-lines-of Perl scripts.
I've never actually set up CVS myself, so I suppose I can't accurately say how easy or not easy it is. The "nobody" might deserve an asterisk - I'm sure it's not literally not a single person, but it seems to be pretty rare in my impression. Nevertheless, AFAIK, the non-distributed nature seems pretty limiting.
In Git, I can just create a local repo for anything, and I don't have to decide where I want it. I could never push it anywhere, or push it to a private hosted repo to collaborate with a person or team, or push it to a public repo to open-source it, and change between any of those at any time. I don't think you can really do that with these hosted systems. You could spin up a local CVS server if you really wanted to, but if you later decided you wanted to open-source it on Sourceforge, don't you have to abandon the history and publish it there as-is?
I don’t think so, it’s been a while, but I think there were tools for copying history between cvs servers. I don’t remember CVS being particularly difficult to manage.
I’ve used Clearcasse in 2006 and it had all the branches that we needed. We didn’t use locks because that was annoying. It was at Deutsche Bank and we were 200.
When I moved to SVN, it was a regression. I really don’t understand why people describe SVN as cutting-edge (and why people didn’t like Clear Case).
I once worked at a corp that sold software. For the exact same software product, maybe 10-20% of customers received so much benefit we could have charged 2-3x the price and they would still be very happy. On the other end, for maybe 10-30+%, the exact same product ranged from painful to a disaster. Often because they would try to force it to work the way their pre-existing paradigms worked instead of taking the time to learn how it actually worked.
> source control was clunky and a pain in the ass to set up
I concur. Creating a CVS repository was not harder than creating a git repository now `cvs -d $dir init`, and using, typical for the time, shared network drive, gives server experience without setting up a specialized server. It was just not included with Windows/typical Windows dev tools, so you had to know it existed, and knowledge was slower and harder to get.
Many of these earlier systems sound terrible and hacky to us, but they were the best that was available at the time. Systems to "lock" files you were working on were pretty common because basically nobody did merges well. Most of them were based on having a server to manage the whole thing too, so they were only really common in corporations and larger and more mature hobbyist teams - this was also before you could spin up a cloud server for most things with a few keystrokes and $5 a month. It's low-effort to spin up a local Git repo to track your work on a tiny personal project, but nobody's going to set up a CVS server for that.
Anybody remember Joel On Software's 12 Steps [0], written in the year 2000, 5 years before the Git project was started? Where "use source control" is Step 1? There's a reason why that's there - at the time it was written, source control was clunky and a pain in the ass to set up, so a lot of smaller companies or ones with less mature development teams never got around to it.
I may be getting a little "old man yells at clouds" here, but be really thankful that Git is FOSS, ubiquitous, works great for 98% of projects, and is superlatively awesome compared to everything that came before it.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...