Needed: some advice on how to make RCS work

[Bernie Cosell]

I'm about to begin a project that will (rightfully) use RCS to oversee
the sources.  My problem is that as I look at the RCS documentation there
are some things that I'm not sure how to make work.  Perhaps folk out there
more experienced with RCS could enlighten me a bit:

a) I am still very much tied to hardcopy listings: for large, complicated
programs I just can't get by reading and writing code through a 24 line
window (I can't even get by with the 64 lines on my BitGraph).  If you
have a big system all RCS'ed up, how do you keep your listings current?
That is, I usually expect to have a notebook on my shelf with the 'current'
system listings in it.  Right now, when I go to mess with something I pull
out the notebook, do an ls -l and compare last-modified dates (which pr
has kindly stamped on each page) with the current files to see which 
listings need to be updated.  Is there some equivalent 'give me the epoch
of everything' function you can perform when everything is RCS'ed?
I also have to probably modify 'pr' to use something other than the
file's last-modified date for its epoch stamp on the listings, since
as I understand it RCS does not preserve modified times (although it
presumably easily could have done so had its writers so chosen, I
suspect), so when I co a file it'll come out with a different last-modified
date than when it was ci'ed.

b) I don't know how to get 'make' to work.  That is, if I want to work on
say one file amdist the many, I can easily 'co' the one file into a 'work'
directory and then edit it, but then what do I do with it?  One thing that
probably works (assuming that I do my incremental work on the same machine
that holds the RCS files) is to have a public place that holds one copy
of the current set of sources of everything, so at least there is a set
of sources (and master .o files, presumably) one can hope to access.  But now:
is there a way to get a makefile set up so that for .c's and .h's in  '.' 
it'll use them, but for the ones it can't find it'll use the copies from the
master directory?  I guess the loader has to know about that, too:
some .o's will want to come out of the master dir, while others will
want to come out of my working dir.

Much thanks!
   /Bernie

ps, replies just to me, cosell at bbn-labs-b.arpa, and I'll summarize back
to anyone else who'd like to hear the answers....  tnx /b