Re: Configuration Management for Ada on Unix

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Chris says

" This inefficiency has a nice advantage, though.  Let's say you have
three modifications, A, B, and C, which affect the original version of
a program.  Using the method which stores only *modifications* to the
base file, you can selectively create a version which incorporates
only the modifications A and C, while leaving out those in B.  With
the way RCS works, the changes in B are inherently a part of C, and
cannot be bypassed."

This makes no sense at all. Of coures you can do this with RCS. The method
in which the informatoin is stored affects only the retrieval times for
various kinds of access, not what information can be accessed. You might
claim that the operation you suggest would be slower on RCS, which is true
since RCS optimizes the (by FAR most common) process of obtaining the last
version, but since you can obtain all versions, of course you can do this
operation. Just think for a moment. If you decide that the only way of
doing your operation is to have the modification steps, then just
create them from the appropriate versions.

So what you end up saying is "this inefficiency has a nice advantage, some
things are efficient." Yes, we know this already!