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Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

WAT. Are you trolling us, or are you that uninformed about VCS history? Giving you the benefit of the doubt, just learn and use git[1]. Yes, there are things about the UI that suck. But the underlying machinery and power it provides is unparalleled.

RCS, in short, is that horrible feet-killing pair of boots that made you think you hated <insert sport here>, when in fact it was just frustration with sub-par equipment.

[1] If you need to learn git, check out Scott Chacon's excellent Pro Git, available for free online at: http://www.git-scm.com/book

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Ha! Fair enough. No, I didn't intend to troll. I've found RCS useful for ad hoc versioning of configuration files on systems without git or other version control systems. Wondering whether anyone still finds it useful. I reckon not!

I used to use RCS, but these days I use mercurial. Pretty much any DVCS is going to be a "better RCS" than RCS (bzr, mercurial, git, fossil, monotone...). Even if you never need to pull/push.

RCS is a lot less complexity and remembering commands than a full-on VCS for a few stray config files.

I've recently installed RCS on a Windows host for versioning my .emacs file, and I rely on Emacs VC to drive the tool.

On Solaris hosts, including locked-down "production", I use SCCS to version my dot-files because it's available by default. For development I use SVN (old too by today's standards).

I don't advocate using these old tools over modern alternatives; however I find their simplicity in the above cases to be beneficial.

rcs doesn't have .gitignore files and accidentally running commands on your top-level repo, so I could see why one would consider it. You don't really need atomic commits for this use case, so rcs is barely worse than the alternatives.

I can't say that I've ever had a problem with accidentally running commands in my top-level repo despite many years of running it under git and other VCS'es.

That said, using tools mentioned in this thread (esp. vcsh[1] and mr[2]) it's possible to have one's cake and eat it too w.r.t. using git for homedir version control without the worries of accidentally running VCS commands on your homedir. They also allow some real benefits, like the ability to use and deploy subsets of your rcfiles. For example, you could easily create profiles like: "server-side minimal core", "main personal system", "work box with employer-specific stuff".

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

[2] http://myrepos.branchable.com/

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