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From: mark@jhereg.Jhereg.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: RCS
Message-ID: <741@jhereg.Jhereg.MN.ORG>
Date: 31 Mar 89 05:11:47 GMT
References: <5372@lynx.UUCP>
Reply-To: mark@jhereg.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn)
Distribution: na
Organization: Minnetech Consulting, Inc., St. Paul, MN
Lines: 29

In article <5372@lynx.UUCP> m5@lynx.UUCP (Mike McNally) writes:
>When a file is checked out (with co) of an RCS directory, it seems to me
>that it would be nice if the modification date were set to the date of
>the revision.  This would keep "make" happy.

I will bias this toward C program development, but the principals hold
pretty well for other things that you would want to RCS.

Usually when you check out a revision, you are doing one of two things:

1.  Checking out a source file which does not exist in the current
    directory.  (if it did, why would you check it out again?  Unless...)

2.  You are replacing an existing source file which may have been "hurt"
    somehow.  (Say you made some "fixes" and found that they broke
    everything, so you want to baseline your software.)

In both of these cases, you want a new object file to match your source
file.  

To give an example, say you have foo.c file which produced a foo.o file.
You then check out a new foo.c.  Chances are, when you do your next make,
you want the foo.o file to be remade.  If RCS checked out the foo.c file at
the last checkin time, foo.o would probably not be remade.

-- 
Mark H. Colburn                  "Look into a child's eye;
Minnetech Consulting, Inc.        there's no hate and there's no lie;
mark@jhereg.mn.org                there's no black and there's no white."