Re: RCS keyword removal

[Andre Spiegel <spiegel@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 03:48, Miles Bader wrote:

> I'd like to do this, but have been nervous to because of my uncertainity
> about CVS's behavior.  If people think it's safe to use `-kb' globally
> I'll do that

I'm not sure I understand the scope you are talking about.  If you mean
to switch off keyword expansion in the Emacs CVS repository as a whole
(so that I would be pretty much the only one who enables it locally),
then we might as well get rid of those keywords in vc-*.el altogether,
because it's really no point if only I keep them.

It was my understanding that these changes would only apply to the
version of Emacs that is managed in parallel using Arch.  My impression
was further that the Arch stuff is more of an experimental setup, and
not the main place of any development.  You also said that Arch has
better features to identify the version of the entire system, than CVS
with its keywords which apply only to single files.

Based on this, I would argue that the RCS keywords ought to be enabled
in the CVS repository (and thus be enabled in every developer's work
area by default, and the released versions of Emacs), until perhaps one
day Arch is used to maintain the Emacs sources completely (and releases
are made from the Arch tree).

> If I'm interpreting the docs correctly, BTW, switching to `-kb' will
> leave expanded keywords in currently checked-out files unchanged (that
> is, if CVS stores keywords unexpanded in the repository, adding `-kb'
> _won't_ suddently cause keywords in checked out files to revert to their
> unexpanded forms), which might be slightly confusing for anyone relying
> on RCS keywords in bug reports.

I don't quite see the point here.  Why don't you just check out your
work area anew, and all your keywords will be unexpanded?  All of this
assumes that we are only talking about disabling the keywords locally
(i.e. using "cvs update -kb file", rather than "cvs admin -kb file").