SYSDOC NEWMASTER                               Robert Duncan, March 1992

Recent changes which haven't yet made it into the HELP file:

1) By popular demand, "diff" records are now being kept for
documentation as well as source files. To limit space usage, I've
arranged that all diff records are compressed (this increases
installation time a little). If we find that space usage is still
getting out of hand, we can write a command script to be run
periodically to prune the DIFFS directories.

2) A new command:

    <ENTER> newmaster history <since>

will display a history of recent events in the LOG file. The argument
<since> can be one of:

    today
    yesterday
    mon ... sun
    jan ... dec
    1 ... 31
    1970 ... 2070

If you also give the "user" option, output is limited to changes made by
that user. So to remind myself what I've done today, I can do:

    <ENTER> newmaster h tod us robd

3) I've also instituted the idea of putting marks in the LOG file to
indicate the occurrence of special events. There are two ways this can
happen: firstly, (I hope) there should be a mark made automatically
every time -pop_internal_version- is changed; secondly, there's a new
command:

    <ENTER> newmaster mark <string>

which explicitly writes a mark to the LOG. This isn't meant for general
use: the idea is to indicate each time a version is installed, or
frozen, or a tape made for ISL or whatever. The mark command locks the
LOG as well as writing to it, so that nobody can install any changes
while the marked event is actually taking place.

The history command accepts a mark as argument (in fact, anything it
doesn't recognise specially it assumes is a mark). So you can try:

    <ENTER> newmaster h 'installed version 14.11'

4) Another new command:

    <ENTER> newmaster unlock <file>

unlocks files locked by a previous "getmaster lock". You can add the
"user" option to the command if the file was locked by somebody else. As
a special case, the command:

    <ENTER> newmaster unlock LOG

will unlock the LOG file if it's been left locked after a failed
installation or deletion.

On the assumption that the "unlock" command is more useful than the
"user" option, the single letter argument "u" is now interpreted as
"unlock". You now have to type at least "us" to indicate the "user"
option.

5) All the commands which take a filename argument, i.e.

    get
    delete
    recover
    unlock

now accept '.' as an argument, meaning the filename read from the header
or footer of the current file. Also, if the '.' is the last thing on the
VED command line, it can be omitted.

So after doing

    <ENTER> src errors.p

the command

    <ENTER> newmaster g

will get the master version (like Aaron's -ved_master- command) and then

    <ENTER> newmaster r

will recover the previous version from that. Repeatedly redoing this
last command will step you through all the back versions.

This change carries over to -ved_getmaster-, which is also less fussy
about the order of its arguments: e.g.

    <ENTER> getmaster <file> l

now works as expected.

6) The option "quit" can now be specified with "get" and "recover" to do
a -qved- on the target file.


There are probably other minor changes which I can't remember off hand.
I will update the HELP file some day.

I decided to change the existing organisation of the newmaster
libraries: instead of lots of autoloadable commands, I've now created a
single LIB * NEWMASTER which loads everything at once. This increases
the load time taken for the first command but makes things easier to
change in the future.


--- sysdoc/newmaster
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1992. All rights reserved. ----------
