The Number Analogy

I am being told:

On the one hand it seems to me that the 'software' concept it important because configuration management should be done with/supported by software tools.

To me this is just a means to an end, not important to the way the principles and practices are explained.

Let's consider the analogy of the tools we have to manage quantities: numbers. We have Roman and Arabic numbers. But oops... are we really speaking of the same thing?

Think at these not as mere representations but as a conceptual tool. Think how the development of mathematics exploded after the adoption of the so-called Arabic numbers (originally Indian, and imported to Italy from Andalusia). How the Greek mathematics had been exclusively qualitative for long, and what computations can be carried away using Roman numbers! It is the concept of number which changed with the adoption of Arabic numbers: from a notation to record quantities to a tool to perform computations. Of course, one can use Arabic numbers only to record quantities, and pretend to ignore computations...

We have the same situation with CM (say from 1950 to 1980) and SCM (after 1990).

There is no end which would come first, and only be served by means, and could survive their inception unchanged. This is never true. I could make my point with singing/writing (think of the Kalevala), or with hand-writing/printing, or with sailing boats/streamers, or with transatlantic ship/airplanes...

SCM is not CM applied or restricted to Software. It never was, or very briefly, for some people, here and there. It altogether using software tools, to manage arbitrary information, with the help of a certain generic modeling based on the concept of Software Configurations.

I would believe the first software tools, diff/patch, SCCS, RCS, were not seen as 'SCM' tools, until late, afterwards, around 1990. The invention of SCM was a merger of two traditions, a rewrite of history.

I believe I witnessed it myself in the early documentation of ClearCase, or maybe of DSEE, in 1990-92. My own prior exposure to related software tools at this time, was only PVCS (in which the P stood for the company name: Polytron, and which I had used ca. 1988).

-- MarcGirod - 05 Mar 2007