So, i converted the repository to SVN (which is what this is based on).
Originally?
None.
Then RCS
Then it forked into EGCS and GCC, and EGCS used CVS
On remerge, we used CVS.
Then we converted to SVN.
I basically rewrote large parts of cvs2svn to make this happen (before that it took weeks to convert and ran out of memory anyway :P)
During cvs2svn conversion, the old GCC RCS versions we had data for were inserted as branches and older revisions, as appropriate
Since the original per-file version numbers were not kept, this was done by inserting it and then incrementing existing version numbers on the RCS files that made up the CVS repository, and hacking up the cvs2svn parser slightly to allow for some idiosyncracies (because now you have a billion years worth of RCS bugs to parse)
So basically, history goes back as far as there were version control systems that were being used, which is roughly 1987
Before someone asks why it got moved to SVN, at the point at which we converted to SVN,
1. git was not popular yet (or all that usable yet for that matter)
2. GCC's biggest VC problem was needing single repository version numbers for tags, and atomic commits, which SVN solved.
Although note that a lot of earlyish GNU codebases kept tons of older versions of source files around in the form of Emacs versioned backup files, and there were RCS-conversion scripts that would commit all of those as RCS versions...
[There would be no log messages for those older versions, of course, but the writers and creation dates of the older files were potentially available... I don't really remember whether those conversion scripts actually used that info or not, although I think they did...]
When I started working on gcc 1.36 (company I was working for was designing Unix workstations and we were fixing the backend for MC680x0) we used RCS. But I'm not sure it was the original SCM, we didn't even have Internet access then :-) And we got gcc 1.35-36-37 "smuggled" to us on the 1/4" tape.
I was a MC680x0 maintainer back in those days. Also picked up i860 for the gcc 2.x stream. Fortunately I was at UMich in the gcc 1.x time, and we had NSFnet.
And yes, I used RCS when working on the gcc source.
Nice to meet you! :-) I still (barely) remember one bug which gave me a hard time - when compiling for 68030, I believe, under certain conditions gcc put floating point variables initialized with a constant into the constant segment. Which caused access violation when code tried to put something else into this variable. Or something along these lines, when was that, 25 years ago? Circa 87 or 88.
We used 860 (not sure) and 960 (definitely) too for other products.
Your last part is not correct. We had the "old-gcc" RCS files, it just was in a format not parseable by CVS. It was not entirely lost, just not easily accessible. Ian Taylor went to the trouble of rewriting the RCS files CVS had, and that we based the SVN repository on, to include the old data, so actually, SVN had more history than the CVS versions, dating back to 1987.
