James,

I have had hardly any experience with using the SCCS commands on the command 
line. 
Our company has been "protected" from dealing with these by our own in-house 
highly-
customised "sccs" script, which I think dates back to the early 1990s. So the 
information I 
can glean might be a bit superficial.

> 
> The manpage I am looking at says: 
> 
> -l    Requests information for all deltas created later than, and
> including, the delta indicated with -r or -c.
> 
> ... but you didn't specify -c or -r.    Do you have any documentation
> from a vendor indicating in more detail what the intended behaviour is
> for this case?

My documentation says the same, and no I didn't specify the "-r" or "-c". Being 
Solaris, the 
man pages are "a bit light", shall we say.

I did some checking and found that we have only one script that uses "prs -l", 
and this 
usage started in Feb 2001 when we moved from using "prs -d" on DG-UX to "prs 
-l" on an 
HP-UX server.

Looks like our usage of the "-d" option was equally "fast and loose" as we 
didn't provide 
any data keywords which are supposed to be required according to current man 
pages on 
AIX and Solaris.

According to AIX's man pages, we could have used "prs -l -r" without a SID to 
get the 
same effect, but "prs -l <s.filename>" has worked for us on HP-UX, AIX and 
Solaris. Both 
seem to work the same on AIX and Solaris.

Another case of undocumented features, I presume.

> 
> In your test file, all the null deltas were created at 09/04/15
> 11:05:36.   So all the deltas down to 3.1 have the same timestamp.
> You're getting all the deltas created at the same time as the most
> recent one.  However, this is not necessarily the same as "all deltas
> created later than, and including", since the order of SID creation
> can normally be disambiguated by position in the delta table or
> sequence number.

I'm not sure, but I think this is always the case - the auto null 
(intermediate) deltas are 
created when the new version is put back in (delta -mmr-list).

I tried using "prs -l -r 24.1" from CSSC but that doesn't work either - all the 
auto null deltas 
are listed. It seems to work okay with Solaris and AIX (native prs), i.e. only 
deltas 24.1, 
25.1 and 26.1 are displayed.

> 
> Looking at the POSIX standard, the behaviour of the operating systems
> you listed does seem to be conforming, and the behaviour of CSSC here
> does seem to be somewhat on the doubtful side, though I'm not certain
> it is definitively not conforming.
> 
> All things considered, I believe a code change is probably indicated.
> However, I also note that the test suite coverage for prs is quite
> poor.  The -l option in particular is not covered.   Could you supply
> a patch adding some relevant test cases in order to make sure that the
> change we make doesn't break something else, but does fix this
> problem?

I will give it a go.

> > 2. I've just noticed that the CSSC "commands" call be run as standalone
> > programs.
> 
> Likewise SCCS.
> 
> > Is there a configure switch that will install get, admin, delta,
> > etc in /usr/bin instead of /usr/libexec/cssc?
> 
> This should work, but I have not tried installing it that way in a
> long time.  Looking at the top-level Makefile.am, I see that it will
> probably always use $(libexecdir)/cssc and so at least part of the
> install directory is not under your control.    You could have a go
> with --execprefix (start with "configure --help") but I suspect that
> that won't do what you want (or it will break sccsdiff).  I'd suggest
> that your best strategy is probably to use symbolic links.
> 
> > I guess I could just add that directory to the PATH.
> 
> The only Unix system I can recall where the SCCS tools are on the
> default PATH is HP-UX (at least, older versions).  Solaris puts them
> in /usr/ccs/bin.   I forget where AIX puts them.

The "default PATH" is of course configurable on Solaris in /etc/default/login, 
in 
/etc/environment on AIX, and /etc/PATH under HP-UX. There is a /usr/ccs/bin 
directory on 
HP-UX 11.00, but the SCCS commands are in /usr/bin. The SCCS commands for AIX 
are 
also in /usr/bin. There are also some more-POSIX-conforming versions of get and 
delta in 
/usr/xpg4/bin on Solaris 9+ (I think).

When setting up a new server, I usually change the default PATH because it is 
not much 
use for our company, but I suppose the supplier's intention is to start with a 
"safe" 
minimalist environment. 

Geoff
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