woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods) (12/10/83)
I have been informed that 4.2BSD does not have SCCS (Source Code Control
System), but rather has Purdue's RCS (Revision Control System). I (and the
scientists I work for) make *extensive* use of SCCS, so this will be a
*major* pain in the butt for us when we go to 4.2 . I also know that supposedly
there is a program "sccstorcs" that converts an SCCS-format file into an RCS-
format file. However, looking through our 4.2 manual, I cannot find a man
page for it, nor can I find any for the RCS commands (although we have received
copies of the RCS man pages, they do not seem to be in the "official" Berkeley
manual, and they do not include the "sccstorcs" man page). This is quite
disturbing, needless to say. So, I come to the following questions:
1) I am not sure SCCS was officially part of 4.1 either. If so, that means
that someone locally implemented it. Has anyone done this for 4.2? If so,
I would be *very* interested in getting a copy. I will mail a tape and
pay any postage cost. If it *was* officially part of 4.1, then why did
they drop it in favor of RCS? Is RCS so much better that it is worth the
major headaches of conversion? In our case, conversion includes a total
rewrite of a whole library of shell scripts I wrote to keep the scientists
from having to remember what all the damn flags are and to watch for stupid
and disastrous errors that can easily occur when someone not very familiar
with SCCS tries to do gets and deltas. Naturally, I am quite anxious to
avoid this since it represents about 2 weeks of work.
2) Failing a postive reply to 1), is there really such a "sccstorcs"
program? Has anyone actually used it? Does it really work? Does it
preserve all the old SCCS deltas? Does anyone have a man page for it
you could mail to me?
For my next trick, I get to talk our systems people into implementing
anything I receive in answer to this article.....
Thanks a million for any help,
GREG
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!hao!woodsrab@cdcvax.UUCP (Roger Bielefeld) (12/13/83)
I'm not positive about this, but I think the SCCS question is really one of licensing (again!). SCCS was licensed with PWB/UNIX, but not with V7 or 32V. It should be covered by a System III license. Since a System III license is not required to obtain 4.2BSD, SCCS can't be included. Roger Bielefeld decvax!cwruecmp!cdcvax!rab
woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods) (12/15/83)
Since it seems to have raised so much controversey, even though I cancelled
the original article because I feared trouble from my management after I found
out we might have been (we aren't) running SCCS illegally, I will post here
what I have found out. SCCS cannot be distributed by Berkeley due to licensing
problems. 4.?BSD requires only a UNIX/32V license, but SCCS requires a PWB
or System III/V license. (For the record, we have a PWB license for our 11/70
(site hao), and a system III license for our VAXen). RCS is public domain, which
means anyone who has a UNIX license of any kind who can get ahold of sources
and/or binaries can run it. The conversion program "sccstorcs" almost works.
Under 4.1a, at least, it has a serious bug which I have been told has been
fixed in 4.2, but I haven't had an opportunity to verify that. The bug comes
in when the SCCS file has removed deltas in it. Every subsequent RCS delta
after that has the wrong descriptive comment associated with it, although
the file contents appear to be OK.
Hope this answers the questions for all those who mailed me "tell me what
you find out". I still do not know if we will need SCCS. I personally
converted to RCS already. It was easier than I thought it would be and
RCS is somewhat faster. However, we do have some library stuff that is
currently maintained with SCCS, I will have to see if anyone here feels
that we need it.
GREG
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