Re: patch for documentation about version control

[Andre Spiegel <spiegel@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 11:43 -0500, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:

> as you can see, the patch does not actually change anything currently
> defined in vc-rcs.el; it is purely additive.  btw, ORIG => 1.41.  if
> there is a better way to get a file's per-line version info w/o parsing
> the masterfile, please let me know in the next few days.

It is fine to read information directly from the RCS master file, VC has
been doing that all along.  What about the efficiency of your parser,
though?  How long does it take to construct this full parse tree for a
large RCS master with many revisions?

Since we do need the line-by-line information, I guess there's not much
else we can do except to go for this full parse tree.

The code needs to be better commented.  It needs to explain in readable
English what you are doing at least in each major step.  "korg / grok /
decorate" is not enough.  This comment:

  ;; cvs envy (for now -- usurpers enjoy the dish best served cold)

is also not particularly helpful.

Finally, some of your variable names need to be improved.  A name like
"p-act-ract" or "r/d/a" is worse than a single-letter identifier because
the reader is left wondering what at all you are talking about.  Please
give meaningful names at least to these two variables/properties.

Please send me an updated version of your patch.  There is no need to do
this via emacs-devel, we can sort this out in personal mail.

Thanks for working on this; having vc-annotate work with RCS will be a
very worthwhile improvement.