Options for Source Code Control: RCS v. SCCS v. CVS

[Reini Urban]

Robert Collins schrieb:
> On Sun, 2004-07-11 at 03:09, Richard Heintze wrote:
> 
>>I need some help understanding how RCS works. I typed
>>"info RCS" and felt confused.
> 
> Not surprisingly. RCS doesn't model what any modern revision control
> system does.

??
For single developers (and esp. single file versioning) it's still 
perfect. KISS-style (http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki/KissStyle).

CVS is just a layer on top of RCS, having to maintain special CVS and 
cvsroot directories. RCS has everything it needs in the ,v ("versioned") 
files. Better is of course a decent filesystem which does versioning 
automatically. LispOS comes to my mind.

>>If so, (1) how do I start the service or deamon for
>>RCS?
>>
>>  (2) does RCS lock out other programmers while one 
>>works on a file or is RCS like CVS and everyone merges
>>their differences later?
> 
> RCS locks out everyone per file. One of CVS's big advances was the
> ability to modify a file without locking everyone out.

rcs -U changes to option to unlocked by default per file. That's what I 
use everyday. I still maintain a bunge of my private filesets with rcs.

In the last 10 years I moved some projects to CVS but always came back 
to the simpliest form, RCS. You can easily interchange the ,v files from 
RCS to CVS forth and back. For CVS you have to move them to a cvsroot 
directory tree. For RCS you keep them together with your project.

> I personally use arch - its offline work mode, built in distributed
> operation & mirroring support make it a dream to use. It versions more
> aspects of project trees than any other RCS I've encountered - it even
> supports file modes, and symlinks.

True. arch is much better and btw. IMHO much more stable and mature than 
subversion.
BTW: "Magically" changing file modes and symlinks violates kiss-style. 
Once you are used to it, ok. But when you have to think 10 minutes 
before every simpliest action it's getting hard. This cannot happen with 
RCS (and CVS also).
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/


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