Re: locked files, how to handle

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 12:47:16PM +0100, Georg Wilckens wrote:
> What is the connection between "cvs admin" and
> rcs?  Are the command simply passed through?

Essentially (though as you've learned by now, it's no longer
implemented that way).

CVS started off as a wrapper around RCS, and a pretty thin one at
that.  Not everything one needs had been implemented yet.  RCS
provided a lot of that missing stuff, and as it happens, most of
it lived in the "rcs" command.

"cvs admin" was invented as a backdoor to "rcs", to give people
access to those missing pieces in a superficially CVS-like way
(i.e. whole-directory, recursively, and using CVS/* to find the
right ,v files in the repo).

This is why "admin" has such an oddball option syntax.  It's
precisely the "rcs" command's syntax, and it fits perfectly with
the syntax for the rest of the commands in the RCS suite, but is
out of place when grafted onto CVS.  It's a syntactic fossil,
like the plural forms "children" and "oxen" in English.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
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