by <Aaron Hawley>.
This page discusses how and where to get help with using RCS, and strategies for solving problems with RCS.
Support for RCS is available the way user support is available for most free software packages: Help is available over the Internet with technologies like email and is free (without charge). This scenario provides both advantages and disadvantages. The support is attractively inexpensive. Feedback to questions and problems can be extremely time-responsive. Queries can reach experienced and knowledgable individuals who can respond with the highest accuracy. Unfortunately, there is no "sure thing" when relying on user support over the Internet. Besides not being guaranteed an answer, the help is limited by electronic communications, which can be less than optimal in comparison to on-site, in-person help or even to telephone support. Expensive, commercial support is no less susceptible to the downfalls of gratis support and to even include a few more problems.
In the year 2005, RCS has not been an actively developed free software package for almost a decade. This means there are very few participating developers listening for user feedback or problems. Regardless, a community of users, former developers and developers of related tools does exist. This resource of knowledge is optimal for providing help for RCS users.
The first place to start looking for help with computer software is the documentation. RCS does not have a complete user manual (yet). However, some documentation does exist from other places (See learning RCS for more information).
The suggestion to read the documention is not an attempt by lazy computer hackers to avoid giving users help. At best, reading documentation helps users solve their own problems, and more often gives the user information to help them better understand their problems and communicate them to others.
The other place to look for help is in forums whose subject-area covers RCS. There are numerous places both on the World Wide Web and on Usenet Newsgroups that archive discussions concerning RCS. Searching these correspondences of previous problems will either reveal the solution, give a piece of the solution, or provide a user better understanding of a problem and how to explain it to others. Some of the forums are enumerated below.
If after paging through the RCS documentation and a solution is not found, then it is time to call for help. This will most likely be made as a message either to an electronic mailing list or a Usenet Newsgroup. Because mailing lists and newgroups are electronic forums and not real-life interactions, you will have to describe your problem as if nobody knows anything about what you are trying to do or what problem you're experiencing. But before reporting your problem, you'll need to figure out which electronic forum to send it to.
Most all user questions can be sent to the 'help-rcs' list. This is a list operated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). (Note: As of 2006, these lists are now moderated to control SPAM messages. Users are encourgaed to subsscribe to these lists now that the mailing list "signal" has improved enormously.) Another venue for general questions and problem is the computer software configuration management (SCM) newsgroup. If your problem is not relevant to either of these forums, then individuals will likely point you to more appropriate ones.
Below are a list of previously mentioned and other forums for getting Internet-based help. They are listed in ascending order by the technical expectation level of participants and discussion.
When reporting problems with GNU RCS, it is important to communicate the following items when asking others for help:
This can be done by running `rcs -V'. This will typically give a response like:
RCS version 5.7
When the above command is executed on non-GNU operating systems (not GNU/Linux nor GNU/Hurd), this will also determine GNU RCS (the GNU Project's RCS software package) is installed or a proprietary clone.
Give the operating system and computer architecture which you are using RCS on. When relevant, include whether you are editing any of the files or storing the RCS revision files on other platforms or networked file systems located on other platforms.
GNU RCS requires the use of the GNU diffutils package. This requires you figure out which 'diff' is installed, and which one RCS is using.
This can be done by running `diff -v'. This will typically respond with:
diff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.1 Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may redistribute copies of this program under the terms of the GNU General Public License. For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING. Written by Paul Eggert, Mike Haertel, David Hayes, Richard Stallman, and Len Tower.
If the 'diff' found in your command path looks correct, RCS may still be using a different 'diff' installed on your system. Which 'diff' RCS is using can be determined by revisiting the output given by the ./configure command upon installation, or the contents of config.cache or config.log files.
Somtimes, the exact problem can be located in the source code and a modifation is found to fix the problem. Patches to the source code are gladly accepted. Patches are not always likely to be applied and accepted to the RCS distribution, but they provide a helpful way to communicate a problem with the software.
Back to Using GNU RCS
Site maintained by Aaron Hawley $Id: support.html,v 1.10 2008-04-01 01:00:56-04 ashawley Exp $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".