Re: How to delete file in RCS

[Dario Niedermann]

Il 04/11/2021 alle 04:06, Sam Lee ha scritto:

> Now, I want to remove one file from the 
> project (because it has become useless after I refactored my code).
[...]
> I cannot do `rm RCS/useless.c,v` because I want to preserve history 
> (i.e. I want to be able to build old versions of my software). Instead, 
> I could simply delete the contents of the file and check in the empty 
> file (i.e. `co -l useless.c`, followed by `> useless.c` to delete the 
> contents, followed by `ci -m'Emptied the file' useless.c`). However, 
> `co RCS/*,v` would still check out the file. This is messy if I have 
> many "deleted" files, because `co RCS/*,v` would check out all the 
> "deleted" files too.

I sometimes create a directory inside RCS/ where I put all the obsolete 
files.

The best approach, though, is to have `make` check out the files as they 
are needed. So you never have to do "the big check out" on RCS/*,v. 
If 'useless.c' is never mentioned in the Makefile as a prerequisite, 
it won't be checked out.

GNU Make has this feature out of the box, but a last-resort rule to 
check out needed files is easy enough to implement in makefiles for 
other `make` versions that aren't RCS-savvy.

--
Dario Niedermann   -:-   finger my email address for PGP key, etc.

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