Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Path: utzoo!telly!eci386!woods
From: woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: SCCS REVISION HISTORY
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.163501.16809@eci386.uucp>
Keywords: SCCS revision history source
Reply-To: woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
References: <143950@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 90 16:35:01 GMT

[ BTW, "Followup-to: poster" doesn't work... :-), and I've dropped the
comp.lang cross-posting too.... ]

In article <143950@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> petej@itcode.Eng.Sun.COM (Pete Jolly) writes:
> I come from an environment that used RCS rather heavily and
> now I am forced (much to my disgust) to use SCCS for source
> archive control.  I don't like SCCS because in my opinion
> it is too hard to get started with and doesn't offer the
> overall flexibility that RCS does.  I will concede that
> it may be much more powerful for those large scale projects
> that have multiple programmers working on the same software.  

Have you tried sccs (i.e. Eric Allman's front-end)?  It makes using
SCCS a breeze.  There are even a few other front ends....

I believe SCCS has more overall flexibility than RCS.  Just how do you
arbitrarily create a custom format for $Header?  Sure there are some
features in RCS that are useful, such as symbolic tags, but this can
be done with a reasonably simple database for SCCS too.

I see SCCS as a set of tools, and RCS as a "system".

> Does anyone out there have any ideas on how to incorporate
> revision history into SCCS source files??

There are several ways I can think of doing this with standard UNIX
tools, but my question is why?  I find this in-line history stuff
rather redundant and it gets in the way of my code.  Even if I put it
at the end of the file.  Prs is always there, again with flexible format.

A better place for the history info is in a change-log file, or in
some form of release notes.  (IMHO)

[ Sorry, this might sound pessimistic, or inflamitory, but I want to
point out that the original question seems the same way to me! ]

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]    VE3-TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA