Re: what constitutes integrity?

[Klaus T. Aehlig]

> I'm curious: Do you manually edit comma-v files often? 

Not on a daily basis, but often enough. What is more important,
however, is the knowledge that I can always do it, if necessary.
This is what gives the secure feeling when working with rcs...

> Anyway,
> perhaps the feature can be designed such that it doesn't onerously
> impact manual editing.  For example:
> 
>   rcs ci -m"Update." foo
>   [manual editing of foo]
>   rcs integrity --rehash foo

I'd prefer a "silently repair" approach. One thing we have to keep
in mind is compatibility; at the very least we should be backwards
compatible to older versions[1]. So we will have to handle silently
missing information (if the file was created by an older version).
If a file created by a newer version and then edited by an older
version (installed versions don't always go forward, e.g., if files
get moved to a different machine) we find ourselfs in a similar
situation as after manual editing, so why not have a silent repair
strategy there as well?

Best,
Klaus


[1] I personally would also appreciate compatibility to CVS. An
important application of rcs is that you can start with version
control now, and only later decide where to set up a cvs repository
or in which existing repository to implant that file.