I've spent a very long time using RCS as a sysadmin. In that time,certain things about how it works have just gotten ingrained in myhindbrain, to the level where I don't think about them consciously;they just are. Now that we're slowly moving away from RCS and to modernversion control systems, I sometimes wind up running into bits ofthis that are no longer true, where I have to let how stuff works inmodern version control gradually soak into my mind until old

Given my previous entry , you mightwonder why RCS does such a crazy thing as deleting and recreate fileswhen you just make a commit (in RCS terms, a checkin) when modernversion control systems don't do this. The answer turns out to be prettysimple: keyword expansion. Specifically, that RCS supports keywordexpansion and modern version control systems don't.

RCS has a feature where you can embed magic keywords in your sourcecode that are automatically expanded to various pieces of informationwhen RCS checks out

Here's something that I was reminded about recently, most directly dueto doing some work on a Solaris machine (although the general issue has come up before ).

Every single package management should provide a way to save the nameand version information for all packages and patches (if you use them)that are installed on a system, and also a way of easily setting upanother system with exactly that set of packages and patches. Thisshould be done through straightforward command line tools; it shouldcertainly not require