Re: What to do about RCS/OpenRCS

On 11 May 2015, at 17:27, Jos Backus <jos_at_catnook.com> wrote:
> 
> I didn't miss anything. My point is that debating to update one piece of
> obsolete software with another is silly, and that FreeBSD should try to
> move forward in this area. But that's hard, as your response indicates.

Steve is correct, and you are missing the point.  Fossil, Git, Mercurial, and so on are all available as packages.  No one is suggesting using RCS in preference to any of them.  

Deleting RCS from the base system would be nice, but unfortunately we can’t because of scripts that depend on some components of RCS.  Replacing these with the OpenRCS equivalents (if they work) would allow us to remove a GPL’d piece of code from the base system.  As long as this doesn’t come with a functionality regression, this would be a nice thing to do.

Replacing RCS in the base system with Fossil solves no problems that actually exist.  It does not allow the scripts that rely on RCS to continue to work and it does not make Fossil easier to use (would you really want to stick with the one in the base system for the entire lifetime of a major release, rather than use the packaged one?).  It would only make sense if we were to move FreeBSD development to Fossil and currently there are a few showstoppers in Fossil that prevent this.

> This is the last I'll say about this, because it appears the community
> isn't ready. Have fun with your ancient version control while Linux
> continues to grow in market share. :-(

And now you’re moving beyond missing the point and just trolling.

David