UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

I am just wondering if you could help me with this.

Suppose I have a file in SCCS a particular user updates the files aand puts back in sccs . when doing so it proments the user to enter the comment.

Basically what I'd expect is the user to enter the changes he or she has made .... but currently even if the user does not enter anything and just hits enter it accepts it. Is there any way by which I can force the user to enter a line of comment or else it would not allow him/her to save the changes.

Please let me know if this can be done.

THANKS
Rooh

You could put a wrapper around the delta command, but the user could still just type a few useless keystrokes. You really need to educate your users. If that doesn't work, you will need management support.... you provide a list of users who are not providing acceptable comments to management and then management takes appropiate action.

Also if they are commenting the deltas, they may not be commenting the code itself. Be sure to check that. And again, you can't automate this. You need to look at the code and see if the comments are acceptable.

Can you please tell me how I can put a wrapper around the delta command to perform this task.

Thanks
Rooh

The delta command has a -y option that can be used to supply the comment. If you use the -y option to supply a cooment, delta doesn't also ask for a comment, it just used whatever you supllied as a argument to -y.

So you can write a script called "delta" that will ask for a comment. The script will perform whatever tests you think appropriate on the supplied comment. If it doesn't like the comment, it will ask again.

Once it has a comment that it likes, it will then call the real delta program. It will pass the real delta all of the arguments that were supplied to the wrapper script. And it will add a -y with the approved comment.

You need to make sure that the wrapper script is invoked when the user types "delta". This could be done by putting it earlier in the path than the real delta. Or you could give the users aliases that point to your script. You could also rename the real delta command to be real.delta or something.