Hello guys and girls,
I'm now working for a team which is enforced to migrate a present
system (health ensurance) written using Oracle's SQL*Forms 3.0 and
running on HP-UX only to client-server architecture (arrrrgh!)
with Oracle Developper.
Whole project is versioned with help of CVS so we want to continue
using this great thing. But...
Oracle Developper uses propriettary pseudo-binary file format, which
is fault prone -- if CVS changes length of keyword value
(e. g. $Author: xy $ to $Author: xyz $), Oracle Developper fails to
open the file.
It is possible to eliminate this disadvantage of CVS - simply change
the behaviour of expand_keywords function in rcs.c.
But I imagine a new kflag (not compatible to RCS but useful for files
that cannot be changed in length by CVS), e. g. -kvp (to express our
goal to refuse migration from CVS to PVCS ;-)
Checking in and out of file with -kvp flag would:
* NOT expand $Keyword$
* expanding $Keyword: Value $ count length of the old Value and
cut the new one (if longer than) to the length or right pad it
with spaces (if shorter than).
There is the user responsibility to reserve enough space for possible
growth of the value of keyword.
And here are the base questions: should I do thing described above?
Can this be useful for anybody else? Is there an interest to this
new functionality? Other comments to my idea?
Thanks.
Jan Serak
