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From: rommel@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: RCS 5.5 for MS-DOS and OS/2
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.080547.5576@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE>
Date: 22 Mar 91 08:05:47 GMT
References: <1991Mar15.075234.17433@gupta.portal.com> <68410004@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com>
Sender: news@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 51

In article <68410004@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com> swh@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com (Steve Harrold)
writes in a followup to an announcement of RCS 5.5 for DOS and OS/2:

>I'm glad you've done the RCS5.5 port to MSDOS as it will save me quite
>a bit of time.
Saves me the time to port to OS/2 too. I had modified a DOS port of 4.2
for 4.3 for OS/2 a while ago.

>You asked for commentary on the ",v" problem, so here is my suggestion.
...
>If you were to provide such an extension, you could allow users to use
>your RCS in three ways:
>
>	1) place archive in current directory
>	2) place archive in RCS sub-directory
>	3) place archive anywhere they want
>
>In the latter 2 cases, you could drop the ",v" suffix, and store the archive
>files with their unaltered original names.  To support all OS flavors,
>you could provide a #define variable to control the form of the suffix 
>(Unix would probably still want the ",v" suffix).

Problems arise when you want to specify both the source file name and
the RCS file name on the command line. The RCS programs would then have
difficultites to determine which of the files the RCS file is and which
the source file. Some programs that work on top of RCS use this.

>To change the subject, how are you handling the end-of-line delimiters under
>MSDOS?  If you save the newlines as CRLF (0x0d0h) in the archive, then the
>archive cannot be copied to a Unix platform and then be decoded correctly.  

There are lots of tools to convert between DOS and Unix text file
formats. FTP even does this automatically in ASCII mode.

>If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to store the archive
>with Unix linends, and let the DOS version of the program strip/restore
>the extra character as needed.  This will provide much more interchangeability
>and interoperability of RCS archives.

No need, I think. Can only cause problems.

>I hope I've been able to give you some food for thought.  Is it possible to
>obtain a ZIP or ARC file of your sources before the cbip distribution?
>If you can place the material on an anonftp machine somewhere, I could do
>the download.  Email seems impractical given the size of the code.

Maybe diffs could be sent to comp.sources.misc? The original sources can
be found in many archives ...
But anon. FTP location would be fine of course.

Kai Uwe Rommel