Thus it was written in the epistle of James Reynolds,
> This Sounds really interesting... Not being to well versed in Posix, Does
> anyone have 'Simple...Easy...Instructions' on how to setup and run RCS
> outside of Posix??  Also, reading in the MPE/ix Shell and Utilities guide, I
> noticed that You could choose the Editor you use so I'm assuming that one
> could use Qedit, Editor, Quad..etc...as your editor of choice???

James,
  I'll take a shot at this off the top of my head.  First of all, RCS won't do
you a lot of good on non-bytestream files without some sort of translation as
it is, inherintly, a Posix utility.  I'll speak briefly to that later.
Assuming that you are working with bytestream source files in the group SOURCE
in the account PROG, you would need to do the following to get setup:

Create the directory in which to store the RCS library files
:newdir RCS.SOURCE.PROG

Check in the source code, leaving an unlocked version in the working file
:ci.hpbin.sys "-u /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"
note that for the RCS commands you have to use the HFS form of the filename
which, for normal MPE files, is all uppercase.

On first check-in, ci will asked for a description of the file.  If MYSRC is
not new source, you'll probably want to tell RCS what version it is:
:ci.hpbin.sys "-u -r3.7 /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"

If you specify a version on first check-in, ci will also ask for change-log
text.  I usually just put "first RCS check-in" or some such.

If you are wanting to edit this file immediately, you'll want a locked version
:ci.hpbin.sys "-l -r3.7 /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"

Your normal source-code editing loop will be something like this:
:co.hpbin.sys "-l /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"
-- edit the file --
:ci.hpbin.sys "-u /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"

If you forget the -l or -o on ci, it will remove your working file and not
replace it.  Not to worry, just co -u or co -l the file and you're back on
track.

The two other commands I use on a regular basis are rlog and rcsdiff.  rlog
shows you the log of the file.  I typically say something like
:rlog.hpbin.sys "-l /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"

Here the -l means "show me just the locked versions" (so I can see if anyone
has the file locked).  For rcsdiff I usually say
:rcsdiff "-c /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"
though sometimes I'll say
:rcsdiff "-c -r3.2 /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"
or
:rcsdiff "-c -r3.2 -r3.3 /PROG/SOURCE/MYSRC"

The -c gives a "context-diff" format listing of the differences.  Diff on MPE
doesn't yet have the -p option or I'd use that instead.  By default, the diff
is done between the source tree head (most often the latest checked-in version)
and the current working file.  Specifying one revision does the diff between
that revision and the current working file.  Specifying two revisions shows
the differences between those two revisions.

To learn more about this stuff, get into the Posix shell and do a

shell/iX> man rcs

Regarding using RCS for flat-ASCII or Qedit files, that's a bit more sticky.
For normal, 80-byte flat-ASCII, unnumbered files, you can use tobyte and
frombyte.hpbin.sys.  I posted here, previously, some command files which would
handle doing the translation for both ASCII and Qedit files.  Those were decent
but a bit hokey and not as reliable as I'd like.  I eventually went back and
wrote a Pascal program which can take an MPE filename, translate the file to
bytestream on the fly, stripping the numbers off, do the RCS stuff to it and
then translate it back to the original format doing its best to put the correct
line numbers back.  I'm can't afford the time to do a lot of support of it
(though I'm happy to listen to comments and suggestions and consider patches),
but if it would be of interest, I can post the source code--and the UDCs which
call the program--on our website or something and y'all can use it if you want.

HTH,
Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Serv, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
                        -- Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662)