Learn to Use RCS

by <Aaron Hawley>.

An important lesson in learning computers is to try things out yourself and experiment. Be sure to do this when trying to learn how to use the Revision Control System (RCS). Another lesson, when you practice with RCS do not practice on any of your work that is of importance. Create some junk files, put them in RCS, make changes to them, put them back in RCS, and keep practicing. Don't try practicing with your memoirs or your personal database application code; neither which you happen to have backed up. Mistakes happen and you learn from them. Don't pay for them.

Read the Fine Manual Pages that Come with RCS

If you have RCS properly installed on you're machine, than read the man pages. These can be read by typing the following command in a shell:

man rcs

If you use the GNU version of RCS then you also have the RCS introduction man page.

man rcsintro

(Who woulda' thunk?)

Other Sources

Learn to use RCS by Learning How to Use the Emacs Editor

Granted, this advice may not be helpful to those who haven't learned to use Emacs, but even if you haven't, it finally gives you a reason to finally do so. And if you take the time to learn Emacs and to use its version control mode (which uses RCS behind-the-scenes), you won't have to learn how to use RCS from the command line.

• GNU Emacs Manual section on the Version Control mode

My Tutorial Document

I have written a tutorial, it is a section of a larger document about using RCS. It is Free Documentation and offers only a quick introductory tutorial for RCS. Understanding this turorial will provide you with the skills to later tackle other features in RCS.

Internet Tutorials

The Internet is full of terse tutorials on RCS. Find them by searing in a popular search engine.

Find one that suits your needs, and read it. It won't be enough to become an RCS guru, but it will get you in the right direction.

Learning From: The Author of RCS

Who would be a better teacher of RCS then the inventor of RCS? The author of RCS, Walter F. Tichy, wrote a paper about his software: RCS—A System for Version Control. It's only twenty pages, and is an even shorter read than that. A beginner and non-technical brain can skip the following parts of the article:

• Which file editors applied deltas in older RCS implementations, unless you're a Unix guru thirsty for more Unix trivia.
• What the hell a piece table is, unless you want to know what the hell a piece table is.
• Usage statistics, unless you want to learn that no one statistically uses version systems for what they're for.
• Overhead of revisions, unless you're concerned with disk space and your operating system fits on one of those five and a quarter inch magnetic storage disks.
• A survey of other version systems, unless you're interested because you wrote a version control system popular in the 1970s.

The introduction to using RCS in Tichy's paper is quick and brief. However, it provides a good overview of what RCS is, and explanations for how it works.

Keep Going.

And like all tutorials you should be sure to learn more about RCS after learning the basics. All of these tutorials are all lacking in different ways and don't give all the explanations or possibilities. There are books out there with that task in mind. And then there are reference sites like this one. For books there is the following:

• Applying RCS and SCCS: From Source Control to Project Control - By Don Bolinger and Tan Bronson. Published March 1995 by O'Reilly. (ISBN: 1-56592-117-8).
• RCS Handbook - available for free on this site.

There is always more to know about RCS and you should continue learning more. RCS profiency, in as many features as possible, can help people in a variety of their day-to-day tasks.

Back to Using GNU RCS

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Text being "A free book about free software", and Back-Cover Texts being "You have freedom to copy and modify this book".