Re: RCS internals

[Aaron S. Hawley]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Rupesh Shantamurty wrote:

> Hi
> Can someone please tell me the internals of RCS. I want to know how it
> works.

To learn how RCS[1] works read the paper[2] by Walter Tichy[3], who
originally designed and developed RCS, which comes in the source
distribution[4] of RCS.

Because RCS is free software[5], you can (among other things) read the
actual source code and tinker with it to see how it works.  My own
experience is that one shouldn't spend too much time because it's not
clearly written C code.  It appears even Tichy decided to rewrite his
proprietary implementation[6] of RCS in Java and C/C++.

Happy hacking,
/a

References

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/

[2] Tichy's paper is available at Citeseer:
<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/tichy91rc.html>, and an HTML version is
located here <http://www.uvm.edu/~ashawley/rcs/tichy1985rcs/html/>.

[3] Walter F. Tichy's Current home page <http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~tichy/>

[4] Source code available from <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/rcs/>

[5] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[6] Revision Control Engine (RCE) <http://www.aicas.com/rce.html>

>
> Regards
> Rupesh Shantamurty

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