Is there an API published or a "How-to-add-your-favorite-SCMS-to-VC" paper someplace? I just had PVCS foisted on me. The recent VCS::PVCS Perl module is a great thing at the command line, but I live in XEmacs. Come to think of it, hasn't someone hacked in an XEmacs extention to allow Perl extentions to be used instead of .els? Yes, I know it is the Sin of all Sins to wander from the True and Righteous Path of Lisp, but I promise I'll only circulate my work among the Perl Community. (Tongue firmly implanted in cheek.) -- Matthew O. Persico Nothing even remotely clever at the moment.

Hi Rod. Long time no read. Of course, that's because I no longer use ClearCase. You may remember that I used to work at Instinet where they used CC a lot. Well, now I'm at Lazard Freres, one of the last private finanical houses in NYC. Matthew.Persico(a)lazard.com Anyway, let's start the call rolling. How do we do that? A spec: 1) Do we want to bolt an API on top of the existing VC package? This may keep us in sync with RMS. 1a) CAN we bolt an API on top of the exising VC package? This question best answered by its maintainers. 2) Whether or not we bolt onto existing OR build from scratch, a first cut at the functionality "newVC" needs to provide is: o checkout/lock the file associated with the current buffer o checkin/unlock the same, possibly with a copy back out. This is to update expanded keywords. o Comments on both of the above. o All of the above on marked files in a dired buffer. Big deal. We all know this. However, if you look at the systems we are trying to integrate, they fall into at least 4 categories: 1) Archive-based systems. This is RCS/SCCS. 2) Archive-grouping mechanisms over archive-based systems. CVS/PVCS (commercial product) 3) Installable file systems. ClearCase 4) Unknowns (at least to me): Perforce, Source Safe One API for these things can't be too sophisticated; to cover 'em all, you need a least common denominator. Well it seems to me the simplest thing to do is simply turn VC into a table-processing extention that just invokes the appropriate external command where needed. You need functions to checkout/checkin files. They should simply write the current file out, prompt for a comment if appropriate, invoke the appropriate shell command to do the work and C-xv the buffer for refresh. You need functions to set the "environment" - that is archive dirs, work dirs, etc. Usually, this is just setting some envvars. Can lisp, like Perl, set envvars in some array that is passed onto subprocesses called from XEmacs (How do you execute shell comands in Lisp anyway?). In some products (ClearCase) this is not as easy. You need to be able to apply these to a dired buffer. Anything else? Sometimes I get the feeling that VC is just too sophisticated for its own good. Flame away. Someone has to try and start pushing this thing up the hill. -- Matthew O. Persico Nothing even remotely clever at the moment.