Re: RCS keyword expansion

[Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@acm.org>]

Peter Karlsson <peter@softwolves.pp.se> writes:
> Yes, but not embedded in the page in a format that is visible to the
> visitor. For CVS I use something like this:
>
> <p class="date">$Date$</p>
>
> to embed the last update time into the page.
>

I guess everyone moving from CVS/SVN to Git faces rethinking of
what the RCS markers really mean in the context of their project.

In my case the identifier was just a away of seeing when the file was
last changed, and who did it.  I decided this fit better as an editor
function, rather than a checkin function.

I changed my editor (Emacs) to convert RCS Ids to timestamps when I
opened a file for reading.  This would fix old files.  When i wrote out
files I would update the timestamp before writing them (via emacs's
timestamp package).  I didn't have to think about it as my RCS Id
stamped files slowly evolve into my editor stamped ones.  I'm sure I
could do something similar in VIM, or with a script encapsulating
another editor.

This actually worked out better for me.  Now the timestamps were updated
even when I hadn't yet checked in the file.  Since I test things before
checking them in, I did not have my file changed after testing by the
checkin process.

I could find the the commit assocated with the file fairly quickly using
"git log" and finding the commit for the file just after its timestamp.

-- 
Barry Fishman