Re: NAS backend for RCS file system

[Bob Proulx]

Keith, Chris wrote:
> Do you know of any issues of separating the RCS frontend to a VMWare
> server and placing the RCS file tree on a network NAS storage drive?

Your question causes some confusion in my mind because RCS doesn't
really have frontends and backends.  Perhaps you could clarify what
you are thinking about?

When using RCS generally both the working copy and the version vault
are accessable as files on the filesystem.  The rcs tools work as long
as the filesystem presents a working interface to them.  Whether the
server is a VMware server or whether the files are hosted on a NAS
really don't matter as long as the interface is a normal filesystem
interface.

Are you asking if you can create a symlink for the ./RCS/ directory
over to an NFS mounted version repository?  Yes.  That is a typical
way to configure rcs to create local sandboxes that access a shared
NFS mounted repository.

Are you asking if there are sometimes problems with NFS
implementations that are buggy and do not implement a correct
filesystem API?  Ugh.  Yes NFS has a long history of problematic
behaviors.  RCS has a few configuration options to work around some
NFS problems.  But those do introduce other problems and so by default
are turned off.  They might not be needed on a best case NFS
implementation so you don't want to turn them on unless you really
need to have them turned on.  Frankly the best advice I can give is
simply to try it.  YMMV.

Bob