What to do about RCS/OpenRCS

[Davide Italiano]

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Pedro Giffuni <pfg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hi;
>
>
>> I guess I see the following options:
>>
>>    1) Just leave GNU RCS in the tree.
>>
>>    2) Improve OpenRCS so it can be swapped in.
>>
>>    3) Remove RCS dependencies from other parts of the tree (e.g.
>> etcupdate)
>>       and import just a /bin/ident binary (perhaps from OpenRCS).
>>
>> Both 2) and 3) require some work.  I suspect 3) requires less. :)
>
>
> I honestly don't see a real problem with (1): we do want to replace as much
> GNU
> software as we can but not at the cost of making our life unnecessarily
> difficult.
>

To be honest I'm not entirely sure what's the real reason of this
crusade. FreeBSD can't import newer version of some components of the
toolchain (e.g. compiler, linker, debugger) and some of them are
slowly (or less slowly) bitrotting. I feel that in that case there's a
real goal which justifies all the headache derived from the
conversion.  For GNU RCS, I'm not completely sure there is. I've never
heard anybody complaining about lack of features for RCS or bugs.
My $0.02, I suspect very few people really rely on it and just
complain for the sake of doing it, but I'm not gonna argue on this
further.

That said, unfortunately there's a lot more than doing the conversion
and fixing the code so that the testsuite will pass.
You need to upstream the fixes and so deal with another layer and
other maintainers otherwise the code in base and the one upstream will
diverge.
People rely from time to time on bugs of old software (e.g. single vs
double dash options) and are gonna complain.
The testsuite, even if comprehensive, unlikely will cover some corner
cases and suddenly software will start breaking. In other words, a lot
of (unneeded) work for you for a software that just worked fine(TM)
until yesterday.
I'm not gonna stop you from doing this, but I learned the hard way
that it's something that can/should be avoided unless really necessary
(and a better license doesn't seem to be a strong enough reason,
IMHO).

-- 
Davide

"There are no solved problems; there are only problems that are more
or less solved" -- Henri Poincare