GNU RCS manual (the official documentation)
GNU RCS manual (HTML – with one web page per node)
GNU RCS manual : the rcs command itself there
A Manual to the GNU Revision Control System (RCS) (by Aaron S. Hawley)
This is the chapter on Locking.
(Sooner or later this link will dangle. Sorry for that.)
I still love and use RCS. Ever since I did an early port of RCS to SysV and I met WFT. That work got paid by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft at Karlsruhe then, and Johannes Röhrich told me to do that. I am glad he did.
Of course I see serious uses for Mercurial, Git, and Subversion, but for my personal use I still think RCS is just lightweight enough.
pros:
- rather, rather lightweight
- integrated into Emacs
- I got quite some experience with it
cons:
- diffs are not compressed
- no concept like team
Why did I start this article today?
I decided to set my .procmailrc into non-strict locking mode, so that I save one command during change+deploy.
I searched the web for the RCS documentation, so that I could refer to it, and I got carried away …
Why did Aaron S. Hawley did not seriously attempt to improve the official texinfo source for the RCS documentation?