What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 14, 2020 16:09 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: What's coming in Go 1.15 by tao
Parent article: What's coming in Go 1.15

Nah, SVN is much worse and deserves to not be mentioned any more.

I do use git, but I’ve been working with CVS for two decades and am the current de-facto maintainer.

(I don’t know the other git thing, but IIRC wasn’t it just short for “GNU It” or something, a file manager or so?)

Oh, and RCS is nice for ad-hōc single-file version control, such as my DNS zone file. It’s also used in at least two BSDs’ etckeeper equivalent.

What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 14, 2020 16:57 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

> (I don’t know the other git thing, but IIRC wasn’t it just short for “GNU It” or something, a file manager or so?)

GNU Interactive Tools (Debian package "gnuit"), a file manager that people liked to use, similar to Midnight Commander. There were bitter flamewars about git (the version control system) "stealing" the name of git (which also installed /usr/bin/git), up to the point where Debian used to ship a script that would invoke GNU Interactive Tools if you had it installed and just typed "git", but would run the version control system if you ran git with arguments. There were also arguments about popularity, much like those that happened when the node.js binary "node" conflicted with a HAM radio tool called "node".

Eventually, GNU Interactive Tools renamed that one binary to "gitfm", the excessively magic DWIM script went away, and people got over it. It's also worth observing that the "gnuit" package hasn't had any updates (other than binNMUs) since oldoldstable. Similarly, I would suspect that far more people first heard of the "Go!" (with exclamation point) language because of the gripe against Google's "Go" language than were originally (or are now) users of the "Go!" language.

What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 14, 2020 17:04 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

So it would be rather inconsistent if you complain about the name of Google's Go programming language, but have no problem simply saying "git" to refer to the version control system. In both cases, a more popular project from a more popular source picked a name that happened to conflict with a far less popular existing project.

What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 15, 2020 11:01 UTC (Fri) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link] (1 responses)

> RCS is nice for ad-hōc single-file version control

Then you might be interested in SRC, which puts a modern UI on top of RCS: http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/
(Here, "modern UI" means a CLI like svn/hg/git.)

What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 15, 2020 16:07 UTC (Fri) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Interesting, I didn’t know about it, but I personally won’t need it, the RCS tools are close enough to the corresponding CVS commands to be familiar.

Thanks anyway!