Working with folders in RCS

Question

I have been following the tutorial http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/rcs/tutorial.html on how to work with files using RCS. This works well but only with one file. Is there a way to create an RCS file with directories as well?

I have a project folder called myproject, and in this directory I have all my files for that project. I want to create a revision control system for the myproject folder and all its files that are inside.

Answer 1

As the comments already mention, if you are starting out with version control, you would be well advised to choose a newer system than RCS (git, mercurial, fossil, subversion, ...; in 2023, git should probably be the default choice). That said, RCS still works fine for a single developer working primarily on a single machine - I still use it for my own code because I've not yet worked out how to get the (20+ years of) history I want into git in the way I want it.

Anyway, to use RCS, make sure you have an RCS sub-directory in each directory where you have working source code under RCS management. The RCS files will be placed in the sub-directory automatically, and retrieved automatically. If your version of make is not already aware of RCS, then you can train it so that it is - or get a version of make that does (GNU Make, for example).

Answer 2

TL:DR - Look into DCVS for an alternative of RCS. It uses CVS, which uses RCS, but it's more modular for working in a repository that is distributed, as well as having a hierarchy of directories.

---

I'm currently going through a similar issue, and may have found something worthy of note, especially for people who are being forced to use a light, command-line based revision control systems with multiple team members.

My manager will not get off this idea of using RCS as our version control. But for the specifications, he wants developers to be able to create and edit on their own repository on a localized server within our company. Two issues with this:

1. RCS does not create, nor hold any sort of 'repository'. It is software that keeps track of file edits, on a Per File Basis. Meaning that the 'repository' is nothing more than another directory with RCS checked-in files. This is sub-par for team-geared projects, to say the least.

2. On a large project with multiple directories and tens of individual working files, even the prospect of creating a top-level RCS directory with a symbolic link in the working directories gives rise to complications such as naming conventions, as well as forgetting which file came from which bottom-level / working directory.

With what SamB posted, even CVS gives additional problems with RCS that we now have to account for, but gives us a slight ability for some additional hierarchy. But one suggestion he forgot was DCVS.

It's nothing more than an extension of CVS, CVSup, and:

contains functionality to distribute CVS repositories with local lines of development and automatically handles synchronization of the distributed repositories in the background.

Answer 3

As William's comment says, RCS only works with single files. (It also doesn't seem to be particularly suitable for multiple-user stuff.)

Of course, nothing stops you from putting each (source) file in a directory under RCS control; in fact, this is essentially what CVS does (though in recent versions it handles the RCS data itself, rather than invoking RCS to do it as it used to do). Unfortunately, this fragments the change history rather badly; a commit affecting many files ends up as separate commits to each file, which just happen to have the same commit message (and timestamp?), and in general every file will have a different revision in what the user might like to think of as the "same" revision. (This makes tags quite essential.) CVS also has issues with the atomicity of commits: you could end up with commit A and commit B getting tangled up, such that in file foo commit A precedes commit B, but in file bar commit B precedes commit A!

SVN (Subversion) is an attempt to rectify some of the problems in CVS, though it also brings some new limitations, and keeps many of the existing ones; it is probably wiser (as William implies) to just use a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your multi-file projects. There are many choices:

• Darcs uses a unique patch-based model: a repository is treated as a sequence of patches, which can be applied to an empty tree to build the current revision; patches can often be reordered by "commuting" pairs of patches, and cherry-picking patches from other repositories is quite easy. The downside is that the change history is a bit less clear than in most DVCSes. See http://wiki.darcs.net/Using/Model, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Understanding_Darcs/Patch_theory.
• Directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) based DVCSes model a repository as a directed acyclic graph of revisions, where each revision can have one parent, two parents, or perhaps more. Each revision has an associated file tree state; sometimes renames are also tracked somehow.
  • Git, as already mentioned. Has a very simple model, but a very complicated interface: there are many commands, some of which are not really intended for humans to use (owing to many parts of it having been prototyped in shell script, probably), so it can be hard to find the ones you want. Also, its model might be a bit too simple: it doesn't track renames at all.
  • Bazaar (a.k.a. bzr) has a more complicated model, including support for file/directory renames. It's difficult to say how much more complicated, though, because whatever documentation may exist is not nearly as accessible as Git's. It does, however, have a rather simpler user interface, and there are a number of useful plugins, including a distributed-development-friendly SVN plugin: committing from a branch back to SVN need not interfere with the validity of others' branches of your branches, and bzr metadata is even committed back to SVN. Can make things much less painful if you want to start hacking on an SVN-based project without having commit access, but hope to get your changes committed eventually. Bazaar is my personal favorite DAG-based DVCS.
  • Mercurial (a.k.a. hg) seems fairly similar to Bazaar, though I think it tracks renames only for individual files, not for directories. It also supports plugins, though its SVN plugin isn't as nice as Bazaar's: it doesn't support lossless commits, so branching from other peoples' branches is unwise. I don't have much experience with it, so I can't really evaluate it in-depth.