> I think the best way is probably to check out the CVS repo on your machine, then run cvs log, and cvs diff.

I've used cvs a bit recently.

It's amazing how poor the performance is on large repositories, even on modern machines.

I can't figure out how I put up with this 20 years ago.

Everything was slower back then; we just worked at a slower pace and "disconnected". Turn on the PC, and go make coffee; start a build, and go over notes and comments again; start a download, and clean up the desk or go for a drink at the cooler; launch a big report, and make a phone call.

Now we're so completely absorbed by the screen for so long, we get irritated by any perceived delay.

I want to work in the world you described. I'm 28 and irritated by the pace of modern work, but I have nothing to compare it to and your comment made me ponder. I feel as if there's no room to breathe. Do you have any stories to share?

Get an Usenet account at https://www.eternal-september.org, roam around the comp.lang.* groups, setup slrn to fetch news offline and answer to the groups in 'batch' mode, there's slrnpull for that.

Learn the basics of C and Perl for automation, Perl can do tons of *unix stuff (awk/sed... but better).

Mark Burguess has books on Perl/C (ANSI C and GNU C) and the basics of C++ with systems' programming. I know today Golang would be more apt but if you know how the things work under the shiny stuff, you will apply most of the knowledge from Unix systems' programming to Go in a breeze.

Once you begin to automate scripting, testing and repetitive stuff, you will spend less time with computers.

I should say that that type of forced context switching could be very irritating too. It was a joyous time when laptops started booting in seconds...

This said, you can and should slow it down if you feel overwhelmed, generally speaking. Use reminders to break every 45 minutes or so, then stand up and walk around. Take longer lunches. Generally speaking, lower expectations about your productivity - which, in itself, should not be a life goal. The cult of productivity helps capital, not people. We should be kinder to ourselves.

Now it’s just running that jenkins pipeline, which takes 40 minutes and requires a manual confirmation in the middle .

I remember following the openbsd stable branch about 20 years ago and it was indeed very slow to simply check out and update. Svn felt much better even though it wasn't a revolutionary improvement.

I guess that's why the errata page has source patches. It's also great that they have syspatch now for fast binary patches

> That's the way everybody used to work?

No. In the bad old days, for many people version control software wasn't sufficiently better (and in some respects much worse) than just not using any. So many people didn't use any.

This is true but it was certainly not considered good practise even at the time. I've been on the seller part of a few software companies acquisitions from the early nineties, and checking what kind of source control we were using and how was part of every audit. A long history of sccs -> cvs -> subversion ->mercurial or git...

Yes, though eg Linus Torvalds famously said that them mailing around tar-balls was better than CVS.

You're right, I forgot that it was common to not use source control. However I feel like it was pretty universally recognized to be the "proper" thing to do.

Like I said, not anti-email. I don't see why it's git vs cvs:

> Recall that git was also designed to work over mailing lists. git format-patch, git apply, etc.

Right, and when you do web things with that same git in 2024, it looks and works like it's 2024.

You could use an old git server/file browser UI, or the built-in gitweb[0] for example, but you don't, you use something more modern & featureful, working better on mobile, looking prettier, etc. Even Linux (with its history intertwined with git) uses Github[1] as its mirror, not gitweb or anything looking like the link above for OpenBSD.

[0]: https://repo.or.cz/w/git.git/tree/HEAD:/gitweb/

[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux

If it's something I work on habitually and keep clones of, I prefer to use gitk to browse a local repo over something like GitHub web ui. Maybe I've just gotten old though.

Sure, but you presumably don't put up a bad/old-looking web UI to not use as well? That was my point, given that it's hosted somewhere, why so poorly.