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: "Juanma Barranquero" <lektu@terra.es>
Cc: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu>; "Dr Francis J.
Wright" <F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk>; "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il>;
<emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 3:43 PM
Subject: Re: [F.J.Wright@qmul.ac.uk: rcs2log]


> > > As for your sorting problem, I have no idea what a vc-sort-program
> > > could do since VC doesn't use `sort' (try `grep sort lisp/vc*.el').
> > No, but vc uses rcs2log which in fact seems to need sort.
>
> No, VC does not *use* rcs2log AFAIK.  It does provide some way to run it
> for you, tho.  But it can also be run separately from Emacs, so the
> problem with `sort' should not be fixed in any elisp file, but in rcs2log
> (or maybe in rcs2log.bat instead.  That would be even better so that
> all this ugly w32 business doesn't stain the rest of the code).
>
>
> Stefan


I see the way that vc uses rcs2log as being the same as the way that hexl
mode uses an external helper program.  Here are two possible ways forward.

One is Eli's suggestion, namely a more sophisticated replacement for my
rcs2log.bat file that deduces the correct search path to use for sort.
Clearly this should not use any non-standard Windows technology other than
what is necessary anyway to run rcs2log.  (So, for example, a perl script
would not be not a good solution, although using Windows Script Host might
be.)  A good solution would be to pull the appropriate Cygwin path out of
the Registry, but I'm not sure how feasible that is.

The other is to modify vc.el to allow the user to specify a directory
containing the correct sort program and to prepend that to exec-path before
trying to execute rcs2log.  This could be made to happen only on Windows
platforms.

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.

Francis