Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 13:13:30 -0400
From: kagel AT quasar DOT bloomberg DOT com
To: FIXER AT FAXCSL DOT DCRT DOT NIH DOT GOV
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: SCCS/RCS for DOS/DJGPP
Reply-To: kagel AT ts1 DOT bloomberg DOT com

   Errors-To: postmaster AT ts1
   Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 11:14:33 -0400 (EDT)
   From: Chris Tate <FIXER AT FAXCSL DOT DCRT DOT NIH DOT GOV>
   Content-Type: text
   Content-Length: 1688

   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 GM/CS$ d(--)
   H s:- g+ p0 au a- w+ v+(-*) C++ U+(--) E++ N++ K W---(++)$ M++$ V+
   -po+ Y+ t+ 5-- j+ G? tv b+++ D+++ e++ u++(---) h--- f r+++ n+ y+++

RCS uses some of the more esotheric options to GNU diff unless it is
explicitly configured to use UNIX diff at compile time.

-- 
Art S. Kagel, kagel AT ts1 DOT bloomberg DOT com