It’s Friday… so I dug up one of my all-time favorite web gems: The Unix Family Version Tree. Ever wonder when Unix started? Or the relationship between BSD and System V? Or how closely related Mac OSX is (or is not!) to Linux? Click the chart to see the full-size version.

Here are some notable shortcuts: SystemV, Linux, BSD, HPUX, Solaris, MacOSX, GNU/Hurd, Plan 9, Atari Unix, iPhone OS, Windows OS.

Even for those new to Unix (out on the leaves of the tree!), this time-line has a wealth of interesting information showing the history and relationships of most unix varietals. It will also help explain the usability challenges of switching between divergent OS’ from navigating file-systems to loading drivers to managing hardware.

While this reference isn’t exactly about AccuRev or its software development process automation per-se, it’s a great example of how divergent software can grow over time and how tracking changes between active mainline and previous releases becomes really tricky — unless you have good tools (like AccuRev!).

/happy friday/ – dave

When at the command line (CLI), productivity means keeping your hands on the keyboard. But once your fingers have memorized all the commands, flags, static arguments, and common usage patterns — can you still get faster?

Yes.

Programmable completion is a shell facility that allows for customizing the command line in real-time as it is typed. Also referred to as “TAB Completion”, many shells in both Linux and Windows have a default implementation that support completion on filenames and directories. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get environment variables and functions.

Let’s move to software configuration management (SCM). Various branch and label-based SCM systems like CVS have basic tab completion for commands and flags. Thats a good start. But an agile user needs a context-sensitive, custom-data completion facility. What you ~really~ want is completion on your own data — branch names, labels, usernames, etc.

Users of stream-based AccuRev are in luck.

Do you use AccuRev on Linux? If so, download the latest GNU Bash (2.05+) completion for AccuRev 4.5.x. Here is the README. You’ll never have to memorize flags or type stream names again.

Coming in Part 2 — Support for Windows users.

/happy tabbing/ – dave