Re: [F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk: rcs2log]

["Dr Francis J. Wright" <F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk>]

From: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu>
To: "Dr Francis J. Wright" <F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk>
Cc: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu>; "Juanma
Barranquero" <lektu@terra.es>; "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il>;
<emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 7:22 PM
Subject: Re: [F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk: rcs2log]


> There's a subtle difference: hexl-mode is completely unusable without the
> `hexl' program, whereas VC is fully functional even without rcs2log.
> I.e. support for rcs2log is an added feature to VC, but it is not the
> main purpose of VC.

OK.  Point taken.

> I think modifying vc.el is completely wrong.  Right now vc.el doesn't know
> anything about rcs2log apart from some arguments it can take and what
> things it might output.  It doesn't know it's written in `sh', it doesn't
> know it uses `sort'.  And indeed, rcs2log might be rewritten in Perl
> some day and stop using `sort' and `sh'.

If anyone were going to rewrite rcs2log then I would suggest it should be
rewritten in Emacs Lisp.  Bit it's probably not worth the effort.

> Also rcs2log is actually not particularly linked to Emacs (which
> is why it's also distributed along with CVS), so any fix for w32
> should allow it to work correctly even when it's not run from Emacs.
>
> > I'll think about these two options and see whether I can produce a
solution
> > that people find more acceptable than my original rcs2log.bat solution.
>
> I think an rcs2log.bat wrapper is the right approach, I believe.
> I actually haven't seen any disagreement with it.  The only problem
> mentioned so far has to do with `sort' which is basically unrelated
> to the problem at hand (except for the fact that it is related to the
> same script and to the same platform).

I agree, which is why I proposed the wrapper approach in the first place.
Any customization can be done with environment rather than Lisp variables.
I will send a revised version that does that shortly.

Francis