[kragen]

i have encountered messes of shell scripts that were difficult to maintain; in my first sysadmin job in 01996 i inherited a version control system written as a bunch of csh scripts, built on top of rcs

but they were messy not because they lacked 'abstractions' but because they had far too many

i think shell scripts are significantly more bug-prone per line than programs in most other programming languages, but if the choice is hundreds of thousands of lines in an external dependency, or a ten-line or hundred-line shell script, it's easy for the shell script to be safer

[chasil]

If it was in RCS, then you could directly move the archives under a CVSROOT and use them natively.

CVS had been out since Brian Berliner's version of 1989.

I actually moved a PVCS archive into RCS->CVS this way, and I'm still using it.

[kragen]

that version control system provided a number of facilities cvs didn't (locking, and also a certain degree of integration with our build system permitting the various developers to only recompile the part of the system they were working on, which was important because recompiling the whole thing usually took me about a week, once a month), but it had never actually occurred to me that turning an rcs repository into a cvs repository like that was a possibility. also i never realized pvcs used rcs under the covers. thank you very much

[chasil]

PVCS did not use the RCS format, but the RPM distribution included a perl script to convert the archives.

  $ rpm -ql cvs | grep pvcs
  /usr/share/cvs/contrib/pvcs2rcs

[kragen]

ooh. that would have been very useful two jobs later when i got stuck with pvcs