
GNU RCS 5.9.2 - lelf
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-11/msg00014.html
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comex
I still use RCS occasionally for versioning single files, although the speed
and ease of initialization of Git make it not so useful these days.
Incidentally, having maintained RCS history for a large file that made it up
to 1.1677, I discovered that GNU RCS is very inefficient at applying the
reverse line-based diffs in order to retrieve an old revision - rcs takes 27
seconds to retrieve 1.1 while my small Python implementation takes 0.5
seconds. I guess it probably keeps in-memory data in a contiguous buffer
rather than an array of lines?

~~~
gwu78
Can you post your ,v file somewhere? I'd like to try to replicate your
experiment, using my rcs(1) and cvs(1).

While I'm impressed that your Python script is quick, I'm not sure that Python
is ever "small" compared to any POSIX-like UNIX userland utility. An accurate
perspective of the size of any "Python implementation" would account for (a)
all the files you need to install on top of a POSIX-like UNIX userland in
order to get Python to run and to run your script and (b) the fact that the OS
Torvalds would have used if not for the AT&T lawsuit, namely BSD, does not
include Python in the base install. If Python were truly "small", I'd consider
it for use in embedded systems.

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octo_t
for old legacy systems, keeping /etc/ in RC is (and has been) a massive
godsend.

Its nice to see a rarely used bit of software from 31 years ago still being
maintained.

~~~
jlas
Nowadays I sometimes create a git repo in my /etc directory

~~~
Gnewt
I use etckeeper, which is basically the same thing except with some nice hooks
like auto-commit on apt-get install.

~~~
emillon
And fixes the permissions. With /etc in git it becomes world-readable.

~~~
lallysingh
A script that gets the current permissions for every file/dir and emits a
chmod command for each one is pretty handy.

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davvid
If you find yourself versioning single files, and still want to use Git, you
may want to check out "Zit, the Git-based single file content tracker".

[https://github.com/Oblomov/zit](https://github.com/Oblomov/zit)

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vincie
I use it extensively for any files I touch that I do not share with anyone
else, especially configuration files. Comes included in NetBSD, so no need to
install anything else.

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army
We had to use RCS for university projects and submit the versioned files. It
has many shortcomings but the simplicity of it is nice for some purposes.

------
jng
People still use RCS?

~~~
octagonal
Why take a car to the neighbourhood store when a fit-for-purpose bike would
work just as well, while being free of all the complexities that a car has?

~~~
pekk
because it actually isn't helping your health or the environment to use RCS,
and actually isn't more complex to do with another tool.

