Re: Are my RCS files actually malformed?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() "Peter Budny" <address@hidden>
() Tue, 2 Apr 2013 12:47:03 -0400

   But what I was really looking for is documentation of the edit
   scripts [...]

   [Diff manual] not detailed enough for what I needed.

   ** It doesn't clearly explain how line numbers are referenced (you
      have to go back and read the section on ed scripts... and even
      then, it's not clear that all references to the original file are
      non-relative, that is, they pretend that the input file is
      unmodified even if you add or delete large blocks from it).

   ** It says it addresses the problem with incomplete lines (last line
      of file doesn't end in newline), but doesn't explicitly say how
      this would be represented or counted in number of lines.

Have you explained these difficulties to the diff maintainers?

   When fixing the broken RCS files in my repository, I found all of the
   following: [...]

You mentioned that these files were subject to various and sundry other
tools.  Perhaps the confusion lies w/ them (and their programmers)?

   Through trial and error I was able to decipher the format and figured
   out how to resolve each of those problems... but considering RCS is
   clearly quite strict as to what it accepts as a valid edit script, it
   ought to be documented somewhere.

I confess to also using trial and error in reverse-engineering the edit
scripts format back when i wrote the ‘vc-annotate’ support in vc-rcs.el
(for Emacs).  I was w/o net.access and thus w/o source code.  The key to
understanding the line numbers is to understand the order of application
of the individual commands.  See ‘vc-rcs-annotate-command’ comments.

That said, i did not have broken ,v files (and/or tools, unless you
count my bloody frankenemacs :-D) to contend w/.  That sounds much too
interesting for my taste...

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
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