In article
fe105.usenetserver.com>,
John Passaniti JapanIsShinto.com> wrote:>Let's start with what I'm not interested in. I'm not interested in a
>debate on different version control systems or on the usefulness of
>version control in general.
>
>What I am interested in is what *existing* strategies may have been used
>in the past (or are used now) for doing version control using Forths
>that stored source using *true* blocks.
>
>Note carefully that I make two qualifications here: First, I'm only
>interested in *existing* strategies because I'm looking for something
>that has been proven by others, not an abstract discussion about what
>possibly could be done. Second, I'm asking about Forth systems that are
>based on *true* blocks, not blocks implemented on top of files since the
>trivial answer in that case would be to version control the files
>holding blocks.
Mina is probably one of the few systems that qualify.
One can have a practical system, and edit blocks from floppy
with a full screen editor, and stay within that world.
However even in this case, I make sure the floppy is readable
in MSDOS (such as to be identifiable as containing blocks)
And even in this case the obvious choice is to store the block
system as a whole in RCS.
I have made that more practical, by having each 64th character
replaced by ^J.
The same strategy I will use for blocks (in flash)
used by my Renesas systems. But for now blocks are only
transported from a version controlled source system on
Linux, not back. There is (not yet) a block editor
working over Kermit with a serial line, though that is
planned. (There *is* a program to flash blocks.)
>
>I appreciate that such a version control system might be ultra-minimal
>and not offer features like branching, tagging, differencing, and
>merging, etc.. It might only offer manual roll-back of a specific block
>to a prior state, or possibly a grand snapshot of all blocks captured at
>a particular point in time. Whatever-- I'm just looking for past
>strategies.
If I *had* to do it, I would keep a looseleaf printed copy of screens
and keep track of dates. Then it is easy to have a new version in
front of the old versions of screens. Screens are considered the same
and differing in version based on the remainder of the index line.
THe word .TRIAD suggests that printing screens was common.
Old FIG screen doc's suggest this strategy, but I
have never seen this explained.
Groetjes Albert
