Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 11:14:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Chris Tate <FIXER AT FAXCSL DOT DCRT DOT NIH DOT GOV>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: SCCS/RCS for DOS/DJGPP

Just to clear things up a little bit....

SCCS is a commercial product; it used to be owned by AT&T, and is probably
now owned by Novell (now that Novell owns Unix (tm)).

RCS is the GNU project's Revision Control System; I'm personally more fond
of it than of SCCS.  Also, GNU Make 'knows' about RCS, making it especially
easy to use RCS for source code control.

There are a couple of ports of RCS to DOS that I'm aware of; unfortunately,
they both have serious limitations.  They're both ports of RCS 5.6.  The
one I'm currently using was built with 16-bit tools, and hence has memory
limitations that make it crash/hang when trying to do complex operations
(like check-in or merge) on files larger than about 80K.  This is bad.

The port available in <ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elf/rcsdos/> is built
with DJGPP, and so doesn't have any of these silly DOS memory restrictions.
However, the 'rcsmerge' tool seems to be broken, and apparently it's not
obvious how.  The symptom is an error message from 'diff' (which rcsmerge
uses) indicating invalid switches.  I haven't been able to look at it to
try to figure out what's going on, and the porter (whose name I've
regrettably forgotten for the moment) hasn't said anything about it in
a month or two, so I gather that either he's quite busy with other things,
or the problem is subtle and tricky, or both.

So, to sum up:  I don't know of *any* solid, fully-functional port of RCS
to DOS.  :-(

__________
Christopher Tate                                   fixer AT faxcsl DOT dcrt DOT nih DOT gov
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