Re: RCS and email notification of changes

[Bob Proulx]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> "Kadirvel, Velmurugan" writes:
> > Is there a way RCS can be configured to notify a certain group of
> > folks when changes to a certain file of interest (that is under
> > RCS configuration management) takes place?
> 
> That's not built into RCS, but you can write a shell script to do it.

I have recently found need for this functionality as well.  But of
course rcs has no hook script mechanism and so there is no way to be
triggered in an event driven way when a file changes.  I think the
best that can be done is to install a cron to check the file
periodically.  But if the project has lots of files this can be time
consuming.

If all that is needed is simple notification that the file changed
then timestamp would be enough.  A new file would be a change.  But
adding tags is a change and so the timestamp will change then too.

In my case I want to know the patch/changeset that was installed in
the file.  This is fairly complicated to extract.  The change could
have gone on a branch.  The change could be a tag movement.  About the
best I can think of in this case is to store the state of the file
previously and compare the previous state with the current state.

Bob