Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpl-opus!hpnmdla!john From: john@hpnmdla.hp.com (John McLaughlin) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer Subject: Getting RCS to work Message-ID: <11270006@hpnmdla.hp.com> Date: 6 Mar 91 19:06:25 GMT Organization: HP Network Measurements Div, Santa Rosa, CA Lines: 57 A while back I asked a question regarding a SCCS or RCS package available in the public domain that works. This posting is a summary of what I learned, what works, and How is works. My many thanks to all of the people who responded giving me help. The only PD RCS package I was able to find was in SIMTEL20, in the PD: directory.... "PD1:","","DOSRCSEX.ZIP",1,136791,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 1of3" "PD1:","","DOSRCSMP.ZIP",1,24412,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 2of3" "PD1:","","SH_RCSEX.ZIP",1,170318,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 3of3" DOSRCSMP continas the manual pages (documentation) for RCS and however both DOSRCSEX.ZIP and SH_RCSE.ZIP contined executable versio ns of ci, co, rcs, etc....... Why? what were the differences? why have 3 parts? Additio nally SH_RCSEX.ZIP seemed to contain KSH scripts (not much good for dos... I think...) so we had a mystery on our hands (oh yes, of course None of them work straight out of the box).... THe first thing that had to be done was find a compatible diff, now at first glance this may seem pretty easy, "diff is diff" you might say... And that is where you would be wrong. Below is just a partial listing of the 'diff' versions we found "PD1:","","LDARC.ARC",1,25566,8,890713,"Compare 2 files, create compressed diff file" "PD1:","","DIFFER.SPT",1,11316,7,840214,"SPITBOL pgm displays diffs between 2 txt files" "PD1:","","DIFF114.ARC",1,118540,8,901004,"GNU Text file differences finder" "PD1:","","DIFFRNC2.ARC",1,41464,8,880407,"Displays differences between 2 files" "PD1:","","HDIFF122.ARC",1,37698,8,880627,"File 'diff' utility" diff.arc 15-Mar-89 47557 14 diff.lzh 12-Aug-90 40955 2 hdiff.lzh 18-Jan-90 30141 5 vdiff.arc 17-Jun-88 23026 17 We tried using several of these 'diffs' but none of them seemed to work they either had the wrong options (rcs expected different options) or RCS just chocked on them. However thanks to the help of Leila Burrel-Davis Frank Whaley, and Tom Wicklund I was steered to GNU diff (PD!:DIFF114.ARC) This version seemed to work fine, however I could still not get RCS to work. Finially I figured out that SH_RCSEX.ZIP works but you have to set logname in your enviornment, i.e. the executables in SH_RCSEX.ZIP work just fine as long as you set LOGNAME= If you dont do this you get an error message. I never did get the DOSRCSEX.ZIP executables to work and I am not really sure why 2 versio ns of the executables even exist. Oh well I am happy enough having a package that works. I just wanted to post this informatio n so anyone else trying to use RCS could avoid wasting as much time as I did getting this package running. Once the above changes were put into effect it works like a champ! My thanks to everyone who replied to my original posting!!! -John