http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=91606

I'm at the point in my perl coding that I really think that I need to start using RCS/CVS more; I generally make archive backups, but a RCS would probably make more sense in what I'm doing of late. Additionally, I've just gotten my CPAN account set up and want to start putting some of the utility modules I've posted here to it, but I want the ability to make these updates easy. Even though I'm working by myself on these projects (and for fun), I figure that RCS'ing it cannot hurt.

I've had some experience with RCS before, but mostly though C/C++ programs; I know that things that you haven't checked out could be easily handled by the makefile (you'd got something like "source.c,v" from the RCS directory), but with perl, things are a little different; say I'm developing Module A and Module B; both have sufficiently different functionalities as to be distributed separately, but B relies on A. As to prevent pollution of the installed perl base, these modules are all developed in a user directory. So say I'm working on B, and all aspects of module A have been checked in, such that there is no reference to A in the @INC; is there a way to have perl or RCS or whatever be able to grab a copy of A from the repository and use that as opposed to having to check out a copy of A for testing of B? I would think that here, again, I could use a makefile, and do "make perlrun", which simply launches the perl code I'm testing, using appropriate rules to point to a RCS copy of A, but this seems overkill, somewhat.

In relation to this, I've looked at many of the code blocks for modules here and notice the typical indicators of RCS-inserted data ("$data$") for versions, dates, changes, and so forth, which makes perfect sense. But the format of the initial code block that usually precedes the code is quite different. Is there an accepted format, or should it just be consistent with other modules that I may write ?


Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain