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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.
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
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 rcsintroman rcsman rcsfileman ciman coman rcsdiffman rlogman rcsmergeman rcscleanman rcsfreezeRCS has two mailing lists: <[email protected]> and <[email protected]>.
The main discussion list is <[email protected]>, 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 <[email protected]> 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 one newsgroup related to RCS - comp.software.config-mgmt (Group Archives).
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 <[email protected]>.
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.
If you think you have found a bug in RCS, then you should send as complete a report as possible to <[email protected]>. 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.
RCS is currently being maintained by Paul Eggert.
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Updated: $Date: 2007/02/07 02:37:51 $ $Author: mattl $