SCCS and RCS

[gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA]

From:      Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn at BRL-VLD.ARPA>

Funny that you should know that SCCS is of Berkeley origin.  I rather
thought Mashey & crew had developed it as part of the PWB project at
Bell Labs.  SCCS is now a standard part of UNIX System III and V, and
is described in the documentation accompanying those systems.  RCS
started as a "public domain" equivalent (by Walter Tichy of Purdue) and
is distributed with 4.2BSD.  We use both at BRL and they each have
strong and weak points.  One of the nicest things about SCCS these
days is the support for it in the "make" utility.  Many of our
application codes are maintained as a collection of SCCS archives;
typing "make install clobber" in the appropriate directory extracts the
makefile and all the required sources from the archives, and cleans up
after the product has been tested and installed.  Automation is great.
A complete software project management system would need much more than
just a source document revision control system.  There have been many
such more complete systems discussed at USENIX conferences (MASCOT
comes to mind, and Mashey discussed such a system a couple years ago).