Re: RCS revert to previous version

[Chris]

on 13 Oct 2002, "Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>"
<monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu> spake thusly: 

>>>> If I am working on, say 1.7 of a document using RCS, what is the
>>>> easiest way to revert to a specific version, say 1.4 as an example?
>>> 
>>> What do you mean by "revert" ?
>>> In your example, when you say you want to revert to 1.6, which
>>> of the following options do you mean:
>>> - you simply want the content of the file to be the same as the
>>> one in version 1.6 (and it will be committed as 1.9 if you ever
>>> commit it, at which point 1.6 and 1.9 would be the same)
>>> - you really want to get back to the time when 1.6 was the latest
>>> and simply discard 1.7 and 1.8 (i.e. after reverting to 1.6,
>>> modifying the file and committing it, it'd be committed as 1.7).
>>> - you want to go back to the time of 1.6 but without discarding
>>> 1.7 and 1.8, such that after modifying the file, it will be
>>> committed as 1.6.1.1 (i.e. first version on a new branch named
>>> 1.6.1). 
>>> - yet something else.
> 
>> I want to "revert" as in "go back" to a previous version. Discarding
>> all changes in between. I don't care what the new revision number is
>> when I check the document back in. I care about the content. Most of
>> your other scenarios don't match any meaning of the word "revert"
>> that I am aware of, but hopefully this makes it clearer. I want to be
>> able to say "oops, this is all wrong, let's go back three versions
>> and begin again." 
> 
> All three scenarios are the same as far as the file's content is
> concerned. The difference is in the history information kept in the
> RCS file itself. 

Fine. And since I am going back and starting over, I don't care about the 
version numbers or the comments for versions that have been discarded and 
are unrecoverable... so either having those entries disappear entirely 
and going back to the next available version number (i.e. I revert to 1.4 
and the next checkin makes it 1.5) OR whatever needs to be done (i.e. if 
I have to keep at version 1.8 for the next checkin despite 1.5-1.7 no 
longer existing) would be fine. Unless there is some recoverable text 
(which in this case there would not be) then I am not really interested 
in retaining history information about that unrecoverable text :)