Re: rcs questions.

[Aaron S. Hawley]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 address@hidden wrote:

> Here at Caltrans we are trying to use the rcs I received at
> www.sunfreeware.com for Solaris 2.8.  I have successfully installed the
> software and pretty much everything is working, however we are experiencing
> some differences from the rcs that is currently being used on the hp to
> what we have now on the Solaris box.
> 1) How do we get the rcs on Solaris to recognize all the programs that have
> revision levels from hp onto the Sun?

try a test case of an RCS file created from the HP box to the Solaris box:

your.hp.box>  echo 'Hello one!' > hello.test
your.hp.box>  ci -l -t-'My Hello test file' hello.test
your.hp.box>  echo 'Hello two!' > hello.test
your.hp.box>  ci -m'Added Hello' hello.test
your.hp.box>  scp hello.test,v your.sun.box:.
your.hp.box>  ssh your.sun.box
your.sun.box> co hello.test
your.sun.box> cat hello.test
Hello one!
Hello two!
your.sun.box> _

If this is not what you get then the sun or hp RCS might be using an
incorrect diff format.


> 2) Do we have to start at revision 1 and loose all the history that was
> attained on the hp box?

RCS files themselves should be portable.  As in, they should be usable by
RCS regardless of what Unix platform it is installed on.

Now the version contents might not be portable.  As in an RCS file that
can extract different versions of an executable for a Sun box obviously
doesn't mean the executable will work on an HP.  Those sort of portability
issues still exist.

> 3) Are the co and ci commands that came bundled in the package for Solaris
> work as they currently do on the hp or will there be differences?

As long as you can verify that they are both using GNU RCS version 5.7
(which they most likely are, and even different versions shouldn't be too
much of a problem) and configured to use a working diff (RCS doesn't have
its own diff cababilities), and preferably that diff be from GNU
diffutils, then you should be set.

> 4) Will diff command be the same as it worked on the hp on the Solaris.

As mentioned, that's what you need to ask yourself and/or whoever the
system administrator is..

> We are facing a deadline of tomorrow to get the check in and check out to
> perform as it is on the hp or Caltrans wants to scrap the rcs archival
> program for Harvest.  I would like to keep rcs and not use Harvest, so
> immediate help would be greatly appreciated.
> Thank you

and I thought harvest was a search engine?

good luck.
/a