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Re: The hated $Log$ keyword


From: Greg A. Woods
Subject: Re: The hated $Log$ keyword
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 22:39:52 -0400 (EDT)

[ On Sunday, July 8, 2001 at 20:13:40 (-0400), Eric Siegerman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: The hated $Log$ keyword
>
> I thoroughly agree about $Log$, but:
>   - what's evil about the rest?

The "evil" thing abou RCS keyword design is that they contain their
values when stored in the ,v file, and that they contain their markers
when they appear in a "frozen" file.

This was one of the several things that hindsight shows us SCCS did
right in the first place, especially when you're using it as an
underlying tool for delta management in something like CVS.

>   - why do you put $Header$ in the "totally evil" class, not
>     merely evil?

$Header contains information that has no business ever being seen in the
file content, especially in CVS, though even in plain RCS use it is
bogus.  If you move your repo all that info becomes wrong even though
nothing else has to break.

Well over a decade ago I argued for something half-way between $Id and
$Header in RCS, and I repeated that plea when CVS-II first appeared.
What I wanted was a way to expand just the relative path-prefix within
the repository.  It would have been doable in RCS without much problem,
and with CVS it's actually trivial (though I think CVS still contains an
implementation bug that would make it harder than it should be, and of
course CVS modules attempt to be way more than anyone ever needs,
further complicating the issue).  As it is I usually end up hard-coding
the module name and relative path within the module into my ident strings.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <address@hidden>     <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>;   Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>



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