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considering to move all our stuff from centos 6 to 8, I'm checking tools we use.

I saw in release doc that packages CVS/RCS providing '/usr/bin/ident' command are no more in centos 8

I can't find where a such command is right now ?

( I do need an official solution to use with yum install from inside a docker container )

sleske
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Overnuts
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6 Answers6

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Sorry, I'm afraid you are out of luck.

The ident command is part of the Revision Control System, aka RCS.

RCS used to be available in RHEL/Centos, but was dropped in RHEL 8 according to the RHEL 8.0.0 release notes:

Note that the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and Revision Control System (RCS), available in RHEL 7, are not distributed with RHEL 8.

As far as I can see, there is no other RHEL package that contains ident either - not suprising, as it is probably only useful together with RCS.

You can probably install it manually some way, either by using an older or third-party package (but be careful about compatibility), or by building it yourself.

However, in the long run you should probably consider replacing your use of ident and RCS - it is ancient software, and will probably become more and more difficult to support in futures (as you can see by this problem).

Consider asking a new question about how to replace your use of RCS :-).

sleske
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    The tool is useful even if you don't use the version control system, as it's mainly about extracting tags from binaries... CVS, SVN, Git (if configured), and occassionally other version control systems also embed the `$Foo: $` tags – it has not completely disappeared, although in many cases it's completely useless. Anyway, chances are the tool could be replaced with `perl -ne 'print "$&\n" while /\$\w+::? .+?[ #]\$/g'`. – u1686_grawity Nov 26 '19 at 10:28
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If you need rcs for centos 8, you can build the source rpm from Fedora 31.

Download, install any dependencies & the rpm build environment &

rpmbuild --rebuild rcs-5.9.4-12.fc31.src.rpm

Then install the rpm.

From https://www.webscalability.com/blog/2020/01/rcs-for-centos-rhel-8/

jamespo
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rpmfind shows a CentOS7 package for version rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64 here:

https://rpmfind.net/linux/centos/7.7.1908/os/x86_64/Packages/rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64.rpm

I downloaded this and was able to just do "yum localinstall "

Seems to work fine. YYMV.

UnixDoitWithPipes
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No! You are not out of luck!*

Here is a workaround:

  1. Locate a CentOS 7 system using the same CPU architecture as the CentOS 8 host you wish to install RCS on (usually 32 vs. 64 bit)

  2. On the CentOS 7 system, run yumdownloader rcs. This should produce a file similar to rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64.rpm.

  3. Copy the file created in step 2 to your CentOS 8 system

  4. On your CentOS 8 system, as root run yum --nogpgcheck localinstall rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64.rpm, replacing rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64.rpm in this command with the name of the file you generated in step 2.

You should now have a working install of RCS on your CentOS 8 system. Also, since you installed it with yum, you have a record of its provenance should there ever be a question. For example,

$ dnf provides /usr/bin/rcs
Last metadata expiration check: 0:47:50 ago on Tue 28 Jan 2020 10:17:55 AM CST.
rcs-5.9.0-5.el7.x86_64 : Revision Control System (RCS) file version management tools
Repo        : @System
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/rcs

*as reported in https://superuser.com/a/1505177

CODE-REaD
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To get RCS running on CentOS 8, perform the following:

  1. Download the latest RCS source RPM from a Fedora mirror, like this:

    wget https://fedora.mirror.garr.it/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/Everything/source/tree/Packages/r/rcs-5.9.4-14.fc33.src.rpm

  2. Execute rpmbuild, specifying full path to the file:

    rpmbuild --rebuild /Install/RCS/rcs-5.9.4-14.fc33.src.rpm

  3. Install the CentOS RPM from the following folder:

    /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64

You should then have 3 files:

rcs-5.9.4-14.el8.x86_64.rpm
rcs-debuginfo-5.9.4-14.el8.x86_64.rpm
rcs-debugsource-5.9.4-14.el8.x86_64.rpm
Worthwelle
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user2780979
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You can use a plain ol' rpm (without source) from rpmfind for CentOS 8 (and others, of course).

You can just browse what's there at: "https://rpmfind.net/linux/epel/8/Everything/x86_64/Packages/r"

OR - just go to https://rpmfind.net and enter "rcs epel linux" and you'll see all your choices.

Below is what I used for a RHEL 8 system.

$> wget https://rpmfind.net/linux/epel/8/Everything/x86_64/Packages/r/rcs-5.10.1-3.el8.x86_64.rpm

$> sudo dnf install rcs-5.10.1-3.el8.x86_64.rpm

-- Bailey

Baileyc00
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