rob@b15.INGR.COM (Rob Lemley) (10/27/90)
What is the Source Code Control System Utility "vc" used for? What tools have been developed to create, update and maintain slists. How were these slists organized? What other front-ends and supplementary SCCS software is out there? Any Public Domain stuff? Thanks, Rob -- Rob Lemley System Consultant, Scanning Software, Intergraph, Huntsville, AL 205-730-1546 ...!uunet!ingr!b15!rob OR b15!rcl@ingr.com
woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods) (10/29/90)
In article <1763@b15.INGR.COM> rob@b15.INGR.COM (Rob Lemley) writes: > What is the Source Code Control System Utility "vc" used for? It's a very simple sort of macro processor. We've used it in place of awk or sed to manage different versions of documents. The way we used it was to control the inclusion of sections of a file based on keywords, which allowed us to use SCCS to control the versions of the two very similar documents, with branches being customer specific, and vc differentiating between the two documents. Awk could have done it, but it would have been an awk programme to emulate what vc does naturally. I suppose sed could have been used too, but not as neatly. I suspect vc was originally designed to manage a database of SCCS-ID's for a set of files belonging to a project. However, I have not encountered any software that uses vc in this manner. Perhaps someone at AT&T could enlighten us. Perhaps the papers describing it's use are in a BSTJ, or are available as technical memorandums. > What tools have been developed to create, update and maintain slists. > How were these slists organized? I have never gone beyond a couple of very simple scripts and/or aliases to create files containing the prs output for the top versions of the current files in a format that can be used in a diff with the output of what. This lets one compare quite quickly what changes have been made to sources since a binary was generated, and can be quite useful in support scenarios. I had always wanted a script that could create a new directory, and check out versions of files based on a what list (or a prs list generated at a release date), so that particular versions could be re-created. A fancy script that printed the MR's and comments for differences between a current version, and a what list from an old version would be quite useful too. In the end, what I usually do is make the "version" of a release equal to the exact date (and sometimes the time too). With SCCS it is reasonably easy to find changes subsequent to a particular date, or to check out versions current on a particular date. > What other front-ends and supplementary SCCS software is out there? > Any Public Domain stuff? See my previous posting. Eric Allman's sccs, which comes with most BSD systems, is covered by the BSD copyright, and is essentially freeware. -- Greg A. Woods woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP +1-416-443-1734 [h] +1-416-595-5425 [w] VE3-TCP Toronto, Ontario CANADA
jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald) (10/30/90)
In article <1763@b15.INGR.COM> rob@b15.INGR.COM (Rob Lemley) writes: |What is the Source Code Control System Utility "vc" used for? | |What tools have been developed to create, update and maintain slists. |How were these slists organized? | |What other front-ends and supplementary SCCS software is out there? |Any Public Domain stuff? Vc is a macro processor along the lines of cpp or m4. It is less likely to expand a macro because an incidental piece of text happens to contain the macro name, so it is more convenient than cpp or m4 to use on an existing file than you decide that you want to have multiple versions of. I have used it in conjunction with sccs (by hand not using a front-end for this activity) for managing a legal contract that went through many revisions of the basic (blank) contract with vc managed variants for "draft" or "official" copies of a contract, and for "single CPU" vs "site list of CPUs" versions of the contract. -- Cure the common code... | John Macdonald ...Ban Basic - Christine Linge | jmm@eci386