File checks out as writeable

[Davison, Jeff]

Hello,

I've been an RCS administrator at a company for a few years now, but have never come up with an elegant solution to the following problem.

Maybe someone could shed some light here?

On occasion, I've run across files that check out as writeable (766 perms) for no apparent reason when performing a 'co -r2 $file'.  Other files in the same source directory check out with a normal 666 perms.

The only way that I've found to correct this problem was to remove the ,v file entirely from the archive, and then check it back in.  Of course, to maintain build reproducibility/history, I need to recreate all revisions and apply the appropriate labels.

It seems that there must be a better solution. 

Q:  Is there some character or line in the ,v file that tells the rcs binary to check the file out as writeable in this case? If so, perhaps I can modify/remove it?

Q: What would cause this to happen in the first place?  I had thought that maybe the user's umask value may affect this, or the file permissions on checkin, but I've not been able to reproduce this problem with tests and can see no discernable pattern as to why this happens.

I'm running RCS Version 5.7 on an SGI IRIX6.5 (IP35) machine.

Thanks for your time.

Jeff Davison