Evolution
History is an appropriate link for this page, not only because it's the name of the
oldest source file in Keep-It, but
also because 'History' was the original UNIX command line utility Keep-It was to grow from.
Like most developers I loathe tools that make my job harder to do, no matter how
necessary they are. Source Control systems are just such tools: necessary, but a pain to
use. No one wants to check-in and check-out a file for every small change, but everyone
would like to be able to go back and see what they've done.
History
'History' was my answer: a light weight source control system that could, with a single
command, record all the differences made to many files since last it was run.
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With History
I could go back ten minutes, or ten days, and I didn't have to keep checking things in and
out.
History was written for UNIX in early 1995 (in the 'C' programming language). Its main
core was an adaptive difference engine. Many source control systems I'd used up to this
point were fine at managing plain text files, but give them a binary file (like a
FrameMaker document) and they choked. History, like most source control systems, was to
save disk space by only storing the changes made to a file. However, History
could do this intelligently with any file type. The differencing engine adapted itself to
the file type it was comparing. This was to prove key when it came to dealing with
Microsoft's Structured Storage Documents (such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.).
continued...
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