naked SCCS really SCCS!

[Raulin Olivera]

In article <297 at tree.UUCP>, stever at tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek) writes:
> 
>   "As it turns out, SCCS was designed to have a user interface wrapper put
>   around it, and would be FAIRLY PAINFUL to use without such an interface.
>   For the purposes of this discussion, we assume the presence of the
>   interface known simply as sccs, a public domain interface distributed
>   with SunOS and BSD systems."
>   --Eric Allman, UNIX_Review, March 1989, page 72
> 
> Few things in this world irritate me more than a good idea implemented in a
> brain-dead fashion.  SCCS, as distributed by AT&T with no front end, is
> unfinished software which is generally more trouble to use than it is worth.
> I see stupid syntax requirements like:
> 
>   "admin -ilang s.lang
>   All SCCS files *must* have names that begin with 's.', hence, s.lang"
>   --AT&T Unix System V.2 manual
> 
> And I start thinking ugly thoughts like "maybe the author of sccs used LSD
> on the job?"  I mean, If all sccs files "*must*" start with "s." then why
> *must* I type in "lang s.lang?"  Is it unreasonable to expect admin to deduce[
> this?
> 
> I could rant about other stupid aspects of the implementation but what's
> the point?  I need to access the functionality of sccs without having
> to deal with the ugliness of the implementation.  This system has sh, ksh,
> csh and perl.  I'd greatly appreciate it if someone would send me a friendly
> front end to sccs and save me the trouble of having to write my own from
> scratch.

How hard is it to use the 3 most routine commands of sccs which are
admin (to create the archive), get (to extract versions from the 
archive), and delta (to return a version to the archive)?  I must
admit that I have not used sccs to its full capability but I have
done some significant programming projects with it.  It sure beats
the heck out of making filename.old's and forgetting which version
it was.  Especially if you have many files in your application.  As
far as a front end goes it would be very simple to make a shell 
script to handle the basics.  To use the example cited above with
the admin command and the enforced "s.":

# sccs.sh
admin -i$1 s.$1
<EOF>

Command line % sccs.sh lang

You could even have the shell script remove the lang file if you 
felt that confident that the archive had been properly established.
And you could add fancy prompts to ask you if you wanted to remove
it etc.

Many Unix commands seem to vary in their state of what I might 
consider to be completeness.  However, I believe that this is
a symptom of having many contributors to a robust operating 
system.  I find the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

		=Ralo->