Re: [9fans] rev control

[greg andruk <gja@meowing.net>]

Thanks to all who replied.  Especially helpful was the description of
how Bell Labs put the tools to use -- oh, if only all projects could
be allowed by their respective manglement entities to run that way!

Just a couple notes, since I gather that more people end up using
source control by mandate rather than choice...

There really are reasons for wanting commit logs outside blame
assignment.  For example, I tend to (ab)use RCS as a journal of sorts,
recording random ideas like folllow-ons I might want to consider on
some change I just made, or even something unrelated I might want to
think about putting in later.  If I don't write these things down
right away, I tend to forget them.  Maybe some of this could into the
source files, but sources get seriously ugly that way.

Tags have bailed me out on a few occasions when files were moved to
other places and filesystem timestamps weren't preserved.  A long
history's a really nice thing to have, but it can be too much of a
good thing if you're not quite sure where to start looking.

Anyway... I can get all of what I really want with a little wrapper
script around the editor, and perhaps a mkfile rule here and there for
packaging stuff that escapes outside.  There are only two of us
working on this stuff here, so elaborate lockout schemes would be
overkill.

I did look at porting RCS, but on realizing it wants a fancier flavor
of diff than what Plan 9 provides I made it go away.  Having things
break from guessing incorectly which of the SysV, BSD and GNU versions
of every freaking Unix futility is needed, is a situation I really
don't care to help replicate.

The CVS client port, OTOH, will be a big help in slurping some sources
from places I can't easily get them in another way (Sourceforge etc.),
thanks for that, Russ.