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GNU RCS 5.9.1

33 points| lelf | 12 years ago |lists.gnu.org | reply

28 comments

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[+] jordigh|12 years ago|reply
Why is this still maintained? It even stores its own source under git:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/rcs.git/?h=p

So much for dogfooding...

[+] trothamel|12 years ago|reply
People may have information stored under RCS that they still want to access. It doesn't look like there's a lot of work being done to add new features, but having the ability to run RCS on new machines seems like it's a good hedge against data loss.
[+] gnoway|12 years ago|reply
We're not using RCS, but we use GNU CSSC for an old SCCS codebase.

Many people here are keyed into 'new hotness' startup projects. But there are a lot of us out here maintaining 20+ year old codebases for products in maintenance/support mode only. Migrating them to modern version control is a tough sell. CSSC in particular lets me at least host the code on something modern.

[+] peterwwillis|12 years ago|reply
> So much for dogfooding...

It's not maintained by start-up people or MBAs so they don't have to handicap themselves in a world of trite buzzwords. Also, it's still maintained because people still use it. Figured that would be obvious.

[+] Erwin|12 years ago|reply
If you want to version control a single file locally with no fuss (exactly one file,v file for storing changesets), I could still see it being handy.

It seems it has a maintainer that is very inclusive and accepts all portability fixes. Which is nice enough; many newer open source products are more like fireflies.

[+] bch|12 years ago|reply
I ran into an RCS project of my own, just 2 days ago. There are code repositories out there older than git that are still important.
[+] pcx66|12 years ago|reply
Adding to what others said, someone I know is planning to use this as a starting point for understanding version control systems. The reason stated was it's simplicity.
[+] ghshephard|12 years ago|reply
git / RCS serve very different purposes.

RCS is a pretty excellent tool when you have a single file (like httpd.conf, hosts, a zone file) that you want to manage on a server. 80%+ sysadmins know how to ci/co and use rcs in that context. Likely less than 10% of sysadmins would grok the use of git in that context.

Also - does git even have the concept of "check out with lock, check in free lock, etc?"

[+] Diederich|12 years ago|reply
I believe Perforce still uses RCS under the covers.
[+] tonyplee|12 years ago|reply
It is a dogfood eating cat. :-)
[+] _kst_|12 years ago|reply
In most other VCSs, revision numbers apply to the entire repository. In RCS and CVS, they apply to single files, which can be more convenient if you're maintaining a collection of files that are largely independent of each other.
[+] jsilence|12 years ago|reply
I'm using rcs for quick and dirty versioning of my config files. Very easy to do. Clean. Zero config. No dependencies. No fluff.