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quickie_svt(1)         DragonFly General Commands Manual        quickie_svt(1)

NAME
       quickie_svt - simple version tool

SYNOPSIS
       quickie_svt -Check_Output -History file -File output-file [ -e edit ]
       quickie_svt -Check_In -History file -File input-file
       quickie_svt -List -History file
       quickie_svt -Query -History file
       quickie_svt -Version

DESCRIPTION
       The quickie_svt program is used to manage Quickie's history version
       files.  Normally the quickie(1) CGI progran does this by itself, but
       there may be times when a maintainer needs to access the history
       directly.  (It's also useful for testing.)

OPTIONS
       The following options are understood:

       -History history-file
              This option is used to specify the name of the history file.
              The usual suffix is ",svt".

       -File file-name
               This option is used to specify the name of the input or output
               file.  On checkout, the file name "-" is understood to mean the
               standard output.  There is no equivalent for checkin.

       -Edit edit-number
               This option is used to specify the edit number (version
               number).  On checkout, if no version number is specified, the
               most recent version is given.

       -Check_In
               This option is used to check a file into the history.

       -Check_Out
               This option is used to checkout a file from the history.

       -List   This option is used to list the file's history.

       -Query  This option is used to query edit number of most recent
               checkin.

       -Version
               This option is used to print version number.

       All other options will produce a diagnostic error.

       All options may be abbreviated; the abbreviation is documented as the
       upper case letters, all lower case letters and underscores (_) are
       optional.  You must use consecutive sequences of optional letters.

       All options are case insensitive, you may type them in upper case or
       lower case or a combination of both, case is not important.

       For example: the arguments "-project, "-PROJ" and "-p" are all
       interpreted to mean the -Project option.  The argument "-prj" will not
       be understood, because consecutive optional characters were not
       supplied.

       Options and other command line arguments may be mixed arbitrarily on
       the command line, after the function selectors.

       The GNU long option names are understood.  Since all option names for
       quickie_svt are long, this means ignoring the extra leading '-'.  The
       "--option=value" convention is also understood.

FILE FORMAT
       Each version in the history file consists of an RFC822 header, plus the
       file contents.  The header includes (at least) the Content-Length, used
       to remember the length of the file data in bytes; the Checksum, used to
       remember the Adler32 checksum of the file data; and Version, used to
       remember the version number.  The file data can be text or binary,
       because its length is determined by the header.  There is no quoting
       mechanism of any kind for the data.  Except for the mandatory fields,
       additional user-defined us-ascii meta-data may also be stored in the
       header.  There is no diff or delta of any kind for any version.

       This combination of header and data has good end-to-end behaviour,
       because there is a checksum to validate the file data against.  Bad
       blocks in the data will be detected then next time a checkin or
       checkout is attempted.

       The format of the history file consists of one or more file versions
       with the above layout, joined head-to-tail with no separators or
       boundary indicators of any kind.  The versions are in descending order,
       from most recent (greatest edit number) to least recent (version number
       one).  To determine where one version stops and the next version
       starts, use the Content-Length field in the header.  The entire history
       file is then compressed using the GNU Zip algorithm (via zlib).  There
       is no diff or delta of any kind in the history file.

       The advantage of compressing the file is that there is usually a very
       high redundancy between file versions.  For example, if two identical
       versions are checked in (not necessarily sequentially) the second copy
       will compress to only a few bytes.  Unlike diff(1) style deltas, this
       also copes very will with moving blocks of data within the file.  The
       use of GNU Zip formatting means there is also a checksum for the whole
       history file, which allows you to detect bad blocks in the header
       portions; it also means there is a simple way to extract the data from
       a history file even without the quickie_svt program, or for testing, or
       because you are curious.

       This style of history file was inspired by RFC 3284 - The VCDIFF
       Generic Differencing and Compression Data Format.  While the
       quickie_svt format does not use RFC3284 internally, the arguments for
       compression across file versions in still relevant.

EXIT STATUS
       The quickie_svt command will exit with a status of 1 on any error.  The
       quickie_svt command will only exit with a status of 0 if there are no
       errors.

COPYRIGHT
       quickie_svt version 1.1
       Copyright (C) 2005, 2006 Peter Miller;
       All rights reserved.

       The quickie_svt program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
       use the 'quickie_svt -VERSion License' command.  This is free software
       and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; for
       details use the 'quickie_svt -VERSion License' command.

AUTHOR

       Peter Miller   E-Mail:   millerp@canb.auug.org.au
       /\/\*             WWW:   http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/

Reference Manual                    Quickie                     quickie_svt(1)