From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] rev control References: <87snn6r0bk.fsf@litterbox.meowing.net> From: greg andruk In-Reply-To: greg andruk's message of "Tue, 2 Jan 2001 17:47:58 GMT" Message-ID: <87vgrv2949.fsf@litterbox.meowing.net> User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) XEmacs/21.1 (Capitol Reef) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 00:12:54 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 430a996a-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.