Re: deleting rcs keywords from emacs sources

[Richard Stallman]

    > I can follow how this is useful for you.  I would guess that only a
    > few Lisp file maintainers do this, though.

    It may not be that common among Emacs maintainers, but as I said, it
    surely is an essential feature in many other contexts.

I see no reason to assume that RCS keywords in Emacs files are useful
to anyone in general.  You've said that those in VC files are useful
to some extent for you.

    > If you put a date manually into the files when you send an entire
    > file to someone, it would achieve the same purpose, right?
    > You'd be doing it manually instead of automatically.

    It's doable, but it would be inconvenient.

I asked that question so I can get an idea of how much
inconvenience it would be for you.

We could keep the keywords in the files you maintain, if the
inconvenience for you of removing them would be substantial.  But I
would like to see how much inconvenience we're talking about.

    How about this: CVS/RCS allows you to switch off keyword substitution by
    default for each individual file.  The keywords are then only
    substituted when somebody asks for it while checking out his personal
    working copy.

Maybe that would work ok.  In practice, I am not sure it is much better
than the other two alternatives.