Friday, October 14, 2011

RCS: strict / non-strict locking


GNU RCS manual (the official documentation)


GNU RCS manual (HTML - with one web page per node)

GNU RCS manual : the rcs command itself there


A Manual to the GNU Revision Control System (RCS) (by Aaron S. Hawley)
This is the chapter on Locking.
(Sooner or later this link will dangle. Sorry for that.)

I still love and use RCS. Ever since I did an early port of RCS to SysV and I met WFT. That work got paid by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft at Karlsruhe then, and Johannes Röhrich told me to do that. I am glad he did.
Of course I see serious uses for Mercurial, Git, and Subversion, but for my personal use I still think RCS is just lightweight enough.

pros:

  • rather, rather lightweight
  • integrated into Emacs
  • I got quite some experience with it

cons:

  • diffs are not compressed
  • no concept like team
Why did I start this article today?
I decided to set my .procmailrc into non-strict locking mode, so that I save one command during change+deploy.
I searched the web for the RCS documentation, so that I could refer to it, and I got carried away …

Why did Aaron S. Hawley did not seriously attempt to improve the official texinfo source for the RCS documentation? 

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