Rcs — a system for version control

Abstract

An important problem in program development and maintenance is version control, i.e. the task of keeping a software system consisting of many versions and configurations well organized. The Revision Control System (RCS) is a software tool that assists with that task. RCS manages revisions of text documents, in particular source programs, documentation, and test data. It automates the storing, retrieval, logging and identification of revisions, and it provides selection mechanisms for composing configurations. This paper introduces basic version control concepts and discusses the practice of version control using RCS. For conserving space, RCS stores deltas, i.e. differences between successive revisions. Several delta storage methods are discussed. Usage statistics show that RCS's delta method is space and time efficient. The paper concludes with a detailed survey of version control tools.

Uniform Comparison of Configuration Management Data Models

“…Due to the complexity and variety of existing configuration management systems, we want to model a larger number of these systems, both to validate that containment modeling is sufficiently expressive to represent their data models, as well as to support an initial cross-comparison of data modeling approaches. To begin with, we present containment data models of RCS [14] and SCCS [12], two well-known version control systems, in Figure 2 below.…”

“…That revision histories and revisions are stored in files, and revisions are stored as deltas, can be viewed as concrete representation issues. While these concrete representation issues have an important impact on the performance of the tools (e.g., reverse deltas vs. forward deltas [14]), they are a concern that can be abstracted away when examining data models.…”

“…In the remainder of this paper, we provide a brief introduction to containment modeling, and then apply it to the well known SCCS [12] and RCS [14] systems. Next, we model systems that provide an infrastructural data model, intended for use in creating more complex data models for specific uses or environments.…”

On Storage Policies for Semantic Web Repositories That Support Versioning

“…The obvious drawback of this approach is the excessive storage space requirements. (b) Keep stored only the deltas between two consecutive versions [12,2]. To construct the contents of a particular version one has to execute a (potentially long) sequence of deltas (which could be computationally expensive).…”

“…In addition, it exploits the fact that RDF graphs have not a unique serialization (as it happens with text), and this allows us to explore directions that have not been elaborated by the classical versioning systems for texts (e.g. [12,2]). Specifically, we view an RDF KB as a set of triples.…”