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RCS

As teacher, I do a lot of work with LaTeX. I use several computer to do this: my personal desktop, my personal laptop and my desktop at school. To synchronize them, I use Unison, which is very efficient, in spite of its compatibility problems, from a Linux distribution to another one. But I need a little more than synchronization, I would like to be able to rollback or to merge versions of my tex files, when I make a mistake. With Unison and ZFS snapshots, it is possible, but not really easy.

I was thinking about using Git, but Git synchronization over a Unison synchronization on a ZFS filesystem with snapshots could lead to a big mess, and I did not want to replace Unison by Git for PDF or other non-text files. And even if I just use Git locally, it is clearly bloat for the simple tasks I need: to keep a commented tree of my changes for every tex files and to be able to rollback or to merge them.

Then Gopher helped me: I read

a phlog entry from Solène Rapenne on RCS,

tool that I did not know at all. Simple, time-proofed, frugal and easy to install.

I practiced on a fictive file to check my understanding of the tool and I feel ready to try it at work. Unison synchronization will logically synchronize the v file, which contains the RCS versioning. Very convenient for me.