opinions wanted on sccs front-end

[patti krizowsky]

My company is considering the purchase of a front-end system for 
UNIX's Source Code Control System (SCCS).  The package is called
STS and is from United Systems Inc.  While the package itself
looks pretty decent, it cost $4200 for a 10 user license, and I
feel that's too expensive.  I would like to ask what your opinions
are on this matter.  Let me give you some background info on the 
product.

Half of it is written in shell scripts, a small part written with awk, 
and the rest in C.  It consists of a set of commands to act as a front
end to SCCS, thereby eliminating the need for our programmers to learn
all the commands and options of the SCCS system itself (this in itself
may not be a good thing, but let's not debate it).  Anyway, it lets
you do the following:
    "checkout" and "checkin" files
    cancel a "checkout"
    add programs to SCCS
    browse through controlled files
    compare revisions
    see which files are currently checked out
    see the comment history for a file
    produce file revision reports
    reproduce source from a list of revisions
    and some other functions not required by our company

If you store all your source on one machine and distribute it to
other systems (we do), it will allow remote checkout of a file.
Apparently, this is done using uux and the uuto command.  It requires
you to run uupick to retrieve the file.

Let me state that we use Progress as our database system, and we
would like a front end for Progress to use SCCS without exiting the
Progress editor.  This is something our programmers can write, but
I feel that if we're going to spend $4200 on a package, it should
do everything we require.

Also, if anyone knows of a cheaper SCCS front-end package, please
let me know.  I'd love to have some alternatives to this package.
We could write our own SCCS front-end, but our boss is under the
impression that it would take too much time away from other projects.
We're a paper/pulp mill, not a software development mill :-)

Feel free to send me e-mail, or post your opinions here.  I do
actually read this group on a regular basis.  If I receive lots
of e-mail, I'll post a summary.

Thanks for the input!

-- 
patti krizowsky                                   e-mail:  rdp1!kriz
federal paper board
"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?"
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