SCCS REVISION HISTORY

[Greg A. Woods]

[ BTW, "Followup-to: poster" doesn't work... :-), and I've dropped the
comp.lang cross-posting too.... ]

In article <143950 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> petej at itcode.Eng.Sun.COM (Pete Jolly) writes:
> I come from an environment that used RCS rather heavily and
> now I am forced (much to my disgust) to use SCCS for source
> archive control.  I don't like SCCS because in my opinion
> it is too hard to get started with and doesn't offer the
> overall flexibility that RCS does.  I will concede that
> it may be much more powerful for those large scale projects
> that have multiple programmers working on the same software.  

Have you tried sccs (i.e. Eric Allman's front-end)?  It makes using
SCCS a breeze.  There are even a few other front ends....

I believe SCCS has more overall flexibility than RCS.  Just how do you
arbitrarily create a custom format for $Header?  Sure there are some
features in RCS that are useful, such as symbolic tags, but this can
be done with a reasonably simple database for SCCS too.

I see SCCS as a set of tools, and RCS as a "system".

> Does anyone out there have any ideas on how to incorporate
> revision history into SCCS source files??

There are several ways I can think of doing this with standard UNIX
tools, but my question is why?  I find this in-line history stuff
rather redundant and it gets in the way of my code.  Even if I put it
at the end of the file.  Prs is always there, again with flexible format.

A better place for the history info is in a change-log file, or in
some form of release notes.  (IMHO)

[ Sorry, this might sound pessimistic, or inflamitory, but I want to
point out that the original question seems the same way to me! ]

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP
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