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From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: More technical scoop on Atherton Software BackPlane
Keywords: IPSE, Object Oriented Repository, Configuration Management,
Message-ID: <1991Mar11.184020.4376@twinsun.com>
Date: 11 Mar 91 18:40:20 GMT
References: <34665@athertn.Atherton.COM>
Sender: usenet@twinsun.com
Organization: Twin Sun, Inc
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mcgregor@hemlock.Atherton.COM (Scott McGregor) writes:

>	RCS provides only versioning of individual SOURCE files. The Software
>	Backplane automatically versions not only source files, but arbitrary
>	binary files, and more importantly, collections of related files
>	(configurations).

This info about RCS is out of date: since version 5.5,
RCS has supported versioning of arbitrary binary files.
It's not necessarily space-efficient, but it works.

RCS has limited support for configurations; see `rcs -n'.
You can easily write your own simple configuration methods, e.g.

	ident sourcefile1 sourcefile2 ... >foo.conf
	ci foo.conf

gathers info about a configuration called `foo', so that you can later
use the contents of foo.conf,v 5.7 to retrieve configuration 5.7.
More extensive configuration support is given by the Concurrent
Versions System (CVS), a free front end to RCS.