Re: RCS and checksum

[Guido Sette]

On 2010, Sep 13, at 18:46 , Paul Eggert wrote:

> On 09/12/10 04:52, Guido Sette wrote:
> 
>> Is there any alternative to that application, to compute and verify 
>> checksums (md5 or others) on individual revisions of a RCS file?
>> 
>> Perhaps a simple shell script to invoke before checking in and out?
> 
> That'd be a nice thing to have, but I don't know of any.  Sorry.
> Perhaps you could write one, or find a friend who could?

Mr. Eggert,

I wish I would know more of scripting, I am just a (technically-challenged) 
writer in humanities.

I suspect the task would not be so difficult, though.

Would it be possible to have, just as an outline, some kind of pseudo-code, or 
draft Literate Programming (which, by the way, reminds me of another example 
beside RCS of "older is better", Knuth's TeX system.) to submit to some other 
forum?

If one would be satisfied with recording a checksum of the whole ,v file, it 
would be in my grasp. But that would limit the usefulness, since it would be 
important to know which of the revisions got corrupted (or modified).

I "intuitively" know how the system works, but it is not clear to me the steps 
required to inject a checksum for each revision (As a comment into the file 
itself? As a separate file?).

Anything I will find out I will of course submit for consideration here, if it 
is all right with the list policy.

Thank you for the reply.

Guido Sette