Re: RCS keyword expansion

From: Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@acm.org>
Date: Oct 12, 2007, 17:05 UTC
Message-ID: <m3y7e8jmbm.fsf@barry_fishman.acm.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0710120726470.11771@perkele.intern.softwolves.pp.se>

Peter Karlsson <peter@softwolves.pp.se> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Yes, but not embedded in the page in a format that is visible to the
> visitor. For CVS I use something like this:
>
> <p class="date">$Date$</p>
>
> to embed the last update time into the page.
>

I guess everyone moving from CVS/SVN to Git faces rethinking of what the RCS markers really mean in the context of their project.

In my case the identifier was just a away of seeing when the file was last changed, and who did it. I decided this fit better as an editor function, rather than a checkin function.

I changed my editor (Emacs) to convert RCS Ids to timestamps when I opened a file for reading. This would fix old files. When i wrote out files I would update the timestamp before writing them (via emacs's timestamp package). I didn't have to think about it as my RCS Id stamped files slowly evolve into my editor stamped ones. I'm sure I could do something similar in VIM, or with a script encapsulating another editor.

This actually worked out better for me. Now the timestamps were updated even when I hadn't yet checked in the file. Since I test things before checking them in, I did not have my file changed after testing by the checkin process.

I could find the the commit assocated with the file fairly quickly using "git log" and finding the commit for the file just after its timestamp.

-- 
Barry Fishman