Subject: Re: CCL:RCS in scientific programming

From: Jochen Kuepper <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 48409 07:58:41 +0200

On Tue, 21 Jul 1998 Kynn O. Jones wrote:

>For my research, I typically have several versions of any my code that
>I work with concurrently.  (Each version, of course, perforsm a
>different task).  The source files for these versions differ from each
>other in relatively minor ways, but yet substantially enough that it
>would be too confusing to merge them all into a single source and use
>preprocessor switches to differentiate among the various versions.
>
>Needless to say, it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of all
>these similar source files.  I have heard repeatedly, both from
>scientific and "non-scientific" programmers that RCS is *the* tool to
>take care of this situation, but hard as I've tried, I've never
[snip]

Well, I would say RCS is not _the_ tool to use. You should sreiously look at
CVS at www.cyclic.com. That is like RCS for a full source repository instead of
single files.
It will still have most of the problems you described in you message, but
anyhow, why don't you split your programs into common and distinguished parts
anyhow ? Think about your projects design once more, porbably ? If you can
change that, you might go an much easier way than hacking rcs or cvs.

Greetings,
Jochen
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  Jochen K"upper

  Heinrich-Heine-Universit"at D"usseldorf   [email-masked]
  Institut f"ur Physikalische Chemie I
  Universit"atsstr. 1, Geb 26.43 Raum 02.29    phone ++49-211-8113681
  40225 D"usseldorf                            fax   ++49-211-8115195
  Germany             http://www-public.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de/~jochen
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From: "David E. Bernholdt" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 21:06:16 -0400

On Mon, 20 Jul 1998 16:45:37 -0700 (PDT)  [email-masked] wrote:

> CVS may be the answer ...  It may not handle the desired parallel
> versions though.

It doesn't.

> At the very least, I'd encourage all linearly-oriented
> RCS users to go to CVS.

I agree with this -- I have been using CVS since the late 1980s and I
think it is much superior to raw RCS, even if you're the only
developer on the project.
--
David E. Bernholdt                      | Email:  [email-masked]
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center | Phone:  +1 315 443 3857
111 College Place, Syracuse University  | Fax:    +1 315 443 1973
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100                 | URL:    http://www.npac.syr.edu