SCCS vs RCS

[Kyle Grieser]

In article <19885 at adm.BRL.MIL> mark at ria-emh2.army.mil (Mark D. McKamey IM SA) writes:
>by Purdue University.  What I am looking for is a detailed comparision
>between SCCS and RCS.  Any information concerning such comparison would be
>greatly appreciated.  Thank You,

We (here at PUCC) use RCS extensively for source management.  Both SCCS and
RCS do approximately the same thing, but in reverse.  Let me try to explain.
When you make changes in these two systems, they keep diffs for all of the
different revisions.  The main difference is that SCCS keeps diffs that apply
to the original version and RCS keeps diffs that apply to the current version.
Thus, RCS is much faster when retrieving the latest revision.  In order for
SCCS to get the latest version, it must apply all of its diffs to the original.
The opposite it true for retrieving the original version.  RCS will take
longer than SCCS.

Hope this helps (and that it is generally correct :-),

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Kyle Grieser, Purdue University Computing Center
yuf at mentor.cc.purdue.edu, mentor.cc.purdue.edu!yuf