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I owe my career as a software developer to the Amiga. I might have learned the basics of programming on the Apple II+ and Commodore 64 - but on my Amiga I learned skills I've applied to my whole career. Recently I've been having great fun working my way through stacks of old floppies and finding half-finished projects, source code, graphics resources and generally weird stuff I produced almost 30 years ago! Now I'm trying to get everything organized and I started wondering what kinds of version control systems are available for the classic 68k Amiga.

My first inclination was to try and find a backport of Git, but my google searches came up empty. I remember vaguely there was a program called RCS (I think) that acted as a revision control system. What are people using for version control on a classic Amiga?

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  • This question can be answered with "Yes" or "No", which is not even possible to do since there is a character limit. It can also be answered with a google search, so I don't think it's a great question. Can you rephrase? – pipe Dec 23 '17 at 13:06
  • Well, maybe it is a bad question. I tried googling for a port for AmigaOS and couldn't find one. So I was hoping someone in the community would know more about it than me. – Geo... Dec 23 '17 at 13:16
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    @pipe, I have tried to improve the scope of the question by asking for any possible version control solution for classic AmigaOS. – Geo... Dec 23 '17 at 13:25
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    You could always develop on an emulator from a mounted host drive and use modern version control like SVN or Git natively. That's what I do. RCS is not what I consider proper version control. – tofro Dec 23 '17 at 14:43
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    If there's a port of RCS, you can port CVS on top of that. Still not what would be considered "version control" these days, but at least it beats RCS's limit of tracking only a single file. – Mark Dec 23 '17 at 19:30
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As far as I know, there are only two "serious" contestants: CVS and Subversion.

I have tried both, and had most success with CVS. I had stability problems with the Subversion port but it was too long ago for me to remember what they were. YMMV. The CVS port is "clean", as in, does not require installing a completely separate OS and a shaky ixemul.library (yes, I'm looking at you, the Geek Gadgets environment).

My investigations into getting git ported stopped when the developers told me it relies heavily on a fully functioning fork(). It may be possible to get some of it ported, but so far I've been happy with CVS for basic revision control.

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  • I'm marking this as the correct answer (thanks pipe!) but I'm holding out hope for a Git port. :-) – Geo... Dec 24 '17 at 13:53
  • @Geo... Yes, hopefully I'm wrong, and hopefully some ambitious programmer is triggered enough by my answer to create an awesome OS 3.1 git port. – pipe Dec 24 '17 at 13:54
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RCS can work if you're working alone or in a small team. Like SCCS, the classic Unix VCS, RCS maintains hard version numbers for individual files. This is quite unlike svn, cvs or git that version entire folders.

I still use RCS, as I've been using it since my Amiga days.

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  • CVS, like RCS, maintains hard version numbers for individual files. – Keith Thompson Dec 29 '17 at 0:14

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