RCS Frequently Asked Questions

As the rcsfile(5) man page describes (in RCS 5.7), RCS handles four digit years. It is believed to be Y2K compliant. However, because it is distributed in source form, all users are encouraged to examine the source to make sure it complies with their needs.

RCS version 5.5 and later stored dates with four digit years, but recognised 2 digit years in older RCS files. These versions should be Y2K compliant, but is it suggested that users upgrade to the latest version.

You can determine the version of RCS with the -V option to any of the commands:

    % rcs -V
    RCS version 5.7

    ./conf.sh: testing permissions ...
    ./conf.sh: This command should not be run with superuser permissions.

The RCS configuration and build must be done as a non-root user. The reason is that some systems do not produce meaningful permission check results as root. In general UNIX applications should be configured and built as a non-root user, then installed (if being installed in a standard system directory) as root.

A script was posted years avo to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup to do just that. We have never used it, but others have asked for it and never reported problems. It is available as a shell archive as orignially posted.

You can get information at the GNU project software page

Rlog is displaying the correct time, but it is displaying it as GMT, not local time. All times are stored in the RCS file as GMT. If you want times displayed in the local time, use the -zLT option, or see rlog(1) for more details.

This workaround was provided by Christian Delfosse.

The problem is that sshfs does not allow renaming an existing file if the target name exists and is read-only. Enabling bad_b_rename in the RCS config causes RCS to first unlink the target, then do the rename.

After running configure and make, manually edit src/conf.h and change bad_b_rename setting to 1. Then run make again.

Miklos Szeredi with the sshfs team offered another workaround of using the -oworkaround=rename sshfs option. He also reports that this will be fixed in an upcoming release (already in the CVS respository) if you are using OpenSSH-4.9.