rcs or sccs: which is better?

Guy Harris guy at sun.uucp
Mon Aug 26 13:09:34 AEST 1985


> This is a pre-flame.  Some idiot is going to make the claim that SCCS stores
> the first version of the file, plus diffs to make the later versions, and
> hence is slow to recover later versions.  THEY ARE WRONG!  End-of-pre-flame.

On the other hand, since SCCS stores files as "the following lines are in
thus and such a version, and the lines after that are in these versions,
and...", while RCS stores the latest version and diffs to make earlier
versions, RCS is faster at retrieving the most recent version and slower at
retrieving the earliest version (with some function interpolating between
those data points).  (SCCS takes the same time to retrieve all versions, RCS
takes a time which increases with the number of versions from the most
recent.)

	Guy Harris



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