Re: Trimming old diffs to save space

[Ed Avis]

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Aaron S. Hawley wrote:

>well there is the outdating option `rcs -o`,

I think that the intention of that is to remove old revisions, whereas
I would like to keep the log messages, tags and other stuff, just
remove the content of the particular revision (which means removing
its diffs from the later version - assume I want to remove all
diffs older than a certain point).

Ideally, I'd like to have some -O option like:

% rcs -O1.55: foo
% rcs log foo
[prints full log, same as before]
% co -r1.55 foo
Error: content of revision 1.55 has been deleted

However I will settle for

% co -r1.55 foo
[checks out 1.56, since the diffs for 1.55 have been replaced with an
 empty string]
% co -r1.54 foo
[will be broken, because the necessary chain of diffs from the latest
 revision isn't complete.  So if you delete 1.55 you'd better delete
 all the ones before it too]

and I will settle for implementing this by hand rather than having a
neat option for it.

>i'm pretty sure you can still use the outdating feature, but then
>manually (i assume can be done automatically via Perl) removing the
>outdated revisions, which are placed at the bottom of the file.

I think this will remove the log messages, so it's not what I want.

>of course be sure to backup your RCS files before trying any of
>this!!

No problem, I'll just keep them under version control :-).

-- 
Ed Avis <address@hidden>