Year 2000 - an alternative headache

Hi, If you don't use SCCS, you don't need to read any further. The existing SCCS file format uses a 2-digit year field. Funnily enough, this does not work well once we reach the year 2000. I tested this on my Sun Sparc running Solaris 2.5.1 by setting the date to 2002. If you manage to get a file into SCCS, it comes out with corrupted information, and fetching an old file was not reliable either. Sun is going to be releasing patches for SCCS on Solaris later this year (see their Year 2000 pages at http://www.sun.com). I have not been able to determine whether their change will be the same as anybody else's change to handle the year 2000. It is not clear, therefore, whether SCCS files will continue to be portable to all different machines after the year 2000. Consequently, and much to my chagrin, I've converted from SCCS to RCS, which uses 4-digit dates. I still don't like a number of features of RCS, but having the source code control programs work after the year 2000 offsets the other problems. It is also inherently portable. Traditionally, SCCS files have been too, but it isn't clear whether all the vendors will use the same fix for SCCS, so I'm not taking any chances. I do have a comprehensive version of sccs2rcs which I'll post if people are interested. It is Bourne/Korn shell script (the original was C Shell), and its what I used to do all my conversions. The only item I'm not happy with is the way it handles (or, rather, doesn't handle) branch versions such as 1.10.1.3. I only had one file affected by this, so I ducked and finished that file manually. Yours, Jonathan Leffler (johnl@informix.com) #include <disclaimer.h>