Editing older revisions in RCS. Is there a way?

Question

Am working on a project where revision management is handled with RCS. Let's say that rev 2.2 of a particular file is the rev most recently checked in. I noticed that a while back the wrong file was checked in as rev 2.0. I want to replace the wrong file with the right one. But when I try to check the correct file in as rev. 2.0, I get the error ci: RCS/the_code,v: revision 2.0 too low; must be higher than 2.2

I've tried a few different flags, all with the same result. Any idea how I can do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

You could delete the bad revision and check in the correct file on a branch. That gives you all the correct versions in your history, but perhaps not in the order you want.

Or you could checkout each successive version and check each one into a new RCS directory, substituting the correct file as needed (basically rebuild the history from scratch). Use -d to restore the original date of each checkin, and -w to restore the original author name.

The way RCS stores its information (in a plain file called RCS/filename,v) is straightforward enough that you can just copy filename,v from one RCS directory to another.

(You're still using RCS? Really? Even the RCS sources are maintained in Git.)