Comment by tn1

3 days ago

A couple other people mentioned ClearCase which has something similar if you use their NFS based thing, you could see file or directory history and info by accessing something like `foo.c@@/versions/5` (which isn't ordinarily visible when listing its directory). Pretty nifty.

Your workspaces were also copy-on-write from the base file revisions you were using.

We used Clearcase around year 2000 on HP-UX. I found it nice and powerful, but 90% of the developers did not understand it. Well, probably a similar statement holds for git.

  • I certainly didn’t understand it. We were using it up to 2019. A coworker set up a spec that would automatically mirror to the main codebase, unknown to me that was possible. I made a branch there, did some stuff, and then reverted. Little did I know I was essentially working on production. Broke a bunch of stuff and had to remember what I changed because there was no history. Point is it was too powerful for people that did and didn’t know how to use it.