RCS

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Introduction to RCS

The Revision Control System (RCS) manages multiple revisions of files. RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions. RCS is useful for text that is revised frequently, including source code, programs, documentation, graphics, papers, and form letters.

RCS was first developed by Walter Tichy at Purdue University in the early 1980s. RCS design was an improvement from its predecessor Source Code Control System (SCCS) (see GNU CSSC). The improvements include an easier user interface and improved storage of versions for faster retrieval. RCS improves performance by storing an entire copy of the most recent version and then stores reverse differences (called "deltas"). RCS uses GNU Diffutils to find the differences between versions.

Downloading RCS

The latest RCS source distributions for UNIX and GNU systems and the latest Windows and DOS binaries can be found at the Purdue RCS Homepage. Files can alternately be downloaded from the Purdue FTP site ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/RCS/.

RCS can also be found in the subdirectory /gnu/rcs/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain RCS, please read How to Get GNU Software

Documentation

There is no official manual for RCS, although the RCS distribution comes with the original troff file for Tichy's paper RCS: A System for Version Control (1991). Additional sources of RCS documentation can be found at the Purdue RCS Homepage.

You may also find more information about RCS by looking at man pages (man foo at the shell prompt) on your system, including:

man rcsintro
man rcs
man rcsfile
man ci
man co
man rcsdiff
man rlog
man rcsmerge
man rcsclean
man rcsfreeze

Mailing Lists/Newsgroups

RCS has two mailing lists: <help-rcs@gnu.org> and <bug-rcs@gnu.org>.

The main discussion list is <help-rcs@gnu.org>, and is used to discuss all aspects of RCS, including questions and help.

To subscribe to any RCS mailing list, please send an empty mail with a Subject: header line of just "subscribe" to the relevant -request list. For example, to subscribe yourself to the help list, you would send mail to <help-rcs-request@gnu.org> with no body and a Subject: header line of just "subscribe".

There exist web archives and web interfaces for subscription to these mailing lists.

There is also a special email address used for reporting bugs, <rcs-bugs@cs.purdue.edu>. For details on submitting a bug report, please see the section Report a Bug below.

There is one newsgroup related to RCS - comp.software.config-mgmt (Group Archives).

Request an Enhancement

As recently reported in the NEWS file contained in the source distribution, RCS now conforms to GNU configuration standards and to Posix 1003.1b-1993. If you would like any new feature to be included in future versions of RCS, please send a request to <help-rcs@gnu.org>.

Please remember that development of RCS is a volunteer effort, and you can also contribute to its development. For information about contributing to the GNU Project, please read How to help GNU.

Report a Bug

If you think you have found a bug in RCS, then you should send as complete a report as possible to <bug-rcs@gnu.org>. For usage problems, please send a recipe that duplicates the error. A recipe is the sequence of shell commands executed that duplicates the behavior.

For compilation and portability issues, you should ideally include the output you get from running config.guess, the text you see when you run and configure the software, and any patches made with diff -u5 which fix the problem.

Maintainer

RCS is currently being maintained by RCS Maintainers <rcs-bugs@cs.purdue.edu> at Purdue University.


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Updated: $Date: 2006/01/13 22:07:07 $ $Author: hicham $