I'm surprised there are no good, modern books on design and practice of version control, dependency management, and package management in general terms. The two books I found are both from 2011 before the cambrian explosion of such tooling. 

Continuous Delivery by Humble and Farley (2011)
Software Build Systems by Peter Smith (2011)

Not counting various ephemeral guides to particular systems with O'Reilly type time constants of a couple of years.

Also couldn't find any truly interesting papers that got at some sort of Aha! underlying this. 

Anyway, had ChatGPT 4o1 do a first-pass essay with a table of comparisons and a chronology. It's actually pretty useful. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QhDrn0ZoI6i48-4j5YgFO_I4vNIr1qQVp2LBq0l7R4Q/edit?usp=sharing

This just reminded me, my first and only experience of this world was an unpaid internship at a university CS lab in 1994, where my task was to port RCS to Sco-Unix (which shipped with SCCS). I had no idea what the task even encompassed and failed to make any progress with it at all. I think I got as far as downloading and trying to build RCS from source and failing. At that time, I had some rudimentary experience with C, which did not even extend to make files (I still have no more than hello-world familiarity with such things).

I'd only taken the internship to get access to one of the few labs with internet connectivity, which is what I was actually interested in 🤣. I spent most of that summer hanging out on usenet.

lol, rememberin' my summer in '94 when i was supposed to be porting RCS to Sco-Unix but ended up just chillin' on usenet instead 😂

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

lol, rememberin' my summer in '94 when i was supposed to be porting RCS to Sco-Unix but ended up just chillin' on usenet instead 😂 