Re: Time to remove sccs tags

From: Enji Cooper <yaneurabeya_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2023 22:39:53 UTC
> On Nov 21, 2023, at 10:03 PM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 10:41 PM Philip Paeps <philip@freebsd.org <mailto:philip@freebsd.org>> wrote:
> On 2023-11-22 13:21:27 (+0800), Robert Clausecker wrote:
> > Am Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 01:15:14PM +0800 schrieb Philip Paeps:
> >> On 2023-11-22 00:12:48 (+0800), Warner Losh wrote:
> >>> It's been 30 odd years since the last csrg release. They are no
> >>> more.
> >>>
> >>> At this point I think we can safely remove the few sccs tags that
> >>> remain
> >>> in
> >>> the tree. The data will be there in git if we ever need it.
> >>>
> >>> Comments?
> >>
> >> Long overdue.
> >>
> >> Since we're removing all these tags, should we also remove what(1)
> >> and
> >> possibly ident(1) from the tree?
> >>
> >> Removing what(1) should be non-controversial at this stage.  I can
> >> imagine
> >> some people may still be using ident(1) on extant Subversion systems.
> >
> > what(1) is part of POSIX, though I guess you can just install
> > devel/sccs
> > if you need it.
> 
> I think the only reason we still have what(1) is because it was once
> useful to (help) identify the provenance of a file.  It wasn't very good
> at it in the past, and it certainly isn't very good at it now.
> 
> what is not going anywhere:
> 
> % what /boot/kernel/kernel
> /boot/kernel/kernel:
> FreeBSD 14.0-ALPHA3 amd64 1400097 #27 stable/14-n265023-7be29291845a: Sun Aug 27 12:46:22 MDT 2023
> %

	Brilliant — what(1) definitely helped bring sanity to a slightly complicated Unix golf one-liner at $work. Personally that’s the only item I care about, but RCS/SCCS expanded keywords/tags seem pretty much dead at this point (for better or worse).
Cheers,
-Enji