🚀 go-pugleaf

A while back I asked a question regarding a SCCS or RCS package
available in the public domain that works.  This posting
is a summary of what I learned, what works, and How is
works.

My many thanks to all of the people who responded giving me
help.

The only PD RCS package I was able to find was in SIMTEL20,
in the PD:<MSDOS.PGMUTIL> directory....

"PD1:","<MSDOS.PGMUTL>","DOSRCSEX.ZIP",1,136791,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 1of3"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.PGMUTL>","DOSRCSMP.ZIP",1,24412,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 2of3"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.PGMUTL>","SH_RCSEX.ZIP",1,170318,8,900829,"Revision Control System for text files, 3of3"

DOSRCSMP continas the manual pages (documentation) for RCS and however
both DOSRCSEX.ZIP and SH_RCSE.ZIP contined executable versio ns
of ci, co, rcs, etc....... Why? what were the differences?
why have 3 parts? Additio nally SH_RCSEX.ZIP seemed to contain
KSH scripts (not much good for dos... I think...) so we had
a mystery on our hands (oh yes, of course None of them work
straight out of the box)....

THe first thing that had to be done was find a compatible diff,
now at first glance this may seem pretty easy, "diff is diff" you
might say... And that is where you would be wrong. Below is just
a partial listing of the 'diff' versions we found

"PD1:","<MSDOS.ARC-LBR>","LDARC.ARC",1,25566,8,890713,"Compare 2 files, create compressed diff file"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.FILUTL>","DIFFER.SPT",1,11316,7,840214,"SPITBOL pgm displays diffs between 2 txt files"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.GNUISH>","DIFF114.ARC",1,118540,8,901004,"GNU Text file differences finder"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.TXTUTL>","DIFFRNC2.ARC",1,41464,8,880407,"Displays differences between 2 files"
"PD1:","<MSDOS.TXTUTL>","HDIFF122.ARC",1,37698,8,880627,"File 'diff' utility"

diff.arc                  15-Mar-89    47557                           14
diff.lzh                  12-Aug-90    40955                            2
hdiff.lzh                 18-Jan-90    30141                            5
vdiff.arc                 17-Jun-88    23026                           17

We tried using several of these 'diffs' but none of them seemed to work
they either had the wrong options (rcs expected different options) 
or RCS just chocked on them.  However thanks to the help of Leila Burrel-Davis
Frank Whaley, and Tom Wicklund I was steered to GNU diff 
(PD!:<MSDOS.GNUISH>DIFF114.ARC) This version seemed to work fine, however
I could still not get RCS to work.  Finially I figured out that 
SH_RCSEX.ZIP works but you have to set logname in your enviornment,
i.e. the executables in SH_RCSEX.ZIP work just fine as long as you
set LOGNAME=<some log name> If you dont do this you get an error
message.  I never did get the DOSRCSEX.ZIP executables to work and I
am not really sure why 2 versio ns of the executables even exist.
Oh well I am happy enough having a package that works.  I just wanted
to post this informatio n so anyone else trying to use RCS could avoid
wasting as much time as I did getting this package running.  Once the
above changes were put into effect it works like a champ!  My thanks
to everyone who replied to my original posting!!!

-John