> I think this is one of the most misleading and confusing things people seem to get taught about version control systems. Whether they store deltas or not underneath is actually an irrelevant implementation detail. But surely it's easier to think of version control systems as storing version? It's right there in the name! It's not called a delta control system.
Post author here!
I agree! One of the fascinating bits of SCCS is that it actually exposed the idea of deltas right away to the user. Of course in the 70s, the amount of users was limited, pretty much exclusively programmers familiar with the idea, and probably all people who knew each other :).
Nowdays a VCS should just care about snapshotting your work. In my experience, only Git is so confusing that people need to understand the underpinnings of the system (whats a GC, whats a tree, etc). Systems like SVN, Mercurial & Co all seem to mostly do the right thing for the user with minimal knowledge on the user side.
Fun side note: I had a heated argument with Olivia Mackall, the original author of Mercurial, when I wrote Mercurial bookmarks. I initially called it refs, since they were models after git refs. Olivia insisted to call it bookmarks, since it's the more intuitive english name for what it's doing (bookmarking a part if a book of 'history'). Nowdays I much prefer the name bookmarks, since it's an analogy that makes it easy to reason about what it's doing, rather than a technical term that needs to be learned.
Post author here!
I agree! One of the fascinating bits of SCCS is that it actually exposed the idea of deltas right away to the user. Of course in the 70s, the amount of users was limited, pretty much exclusively programmers familiar with the idea, and probably all people who knew each other :).
Nowdays a VCS should just care about snapshotting your work. In my experience, only Git is so confusing that people need to understand the underpinnings of the system (whats a GC, whats a tree, etc). Systems like SVN, Mercurial & Co all seem to mostly do the right thing for the user with minimal knowledge on the user side.
Fun side note: I had a heated argument with Olivia Mackall, the original author of Mercurial, when I wrote Mercurial bookmarks. I initially called it refs, since they were models after git refs. Olivia insisted to call it bookmarks, since it's the more intuitive english name for what it's doing (bookmarking a part if a book of 'history'). Nowdays I much prefer the name bookmarks, since it's an analogy that makes it easy to reason about what it's doing, rather than a technical term that needs to be learned.