GNU RCS 5.8 on the horizon -- looking for pretesters

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

Greetings,

GNU RCS 5.7 has been out for 15 years now, ravaging filesystems
the entire world over with its comma and its v.  No machine, big-
or small-memory, POSIX or WOESUX, is safe from the scourge of its
dot notation, its keyword expansion, its time(zone)less diff-fanged
maw.  Countless users, mesmerized by its power, squeezing spaces
out of their command-lines, mutter to themselves: Exp, Stab, Rel,
Stab?!, Exp, Exp, Exp...

In January 2010, yours truly tripped (again, after three years)
on a small manpage bug, silently lamented the non-existing info
documentation, dutifully sent in a bug report, and ended up a
few weeks later as a co-maintainer.  The beast, caged at last!

I thought i had it tamed, and did my best to keep it down, but
it found some hidden strength, no doubt angered by the various
indignities suffered at the newbie maintainer's spastic hands,
and now wants to escape.  As GNU RCS 5.8, no less!  Run away!

For now, we confine it to alpha.gnu.org with version 5.7.xx,
and seek volunteers to plumb the depths of its delta-munching
nature.  Are you up to task?  Can you thrash it and find its
weakness, areas of incompleteness (documentation-wise), loss
of {time,memory}-wise finesse, or (hated) faux-eliteness?

If so, please feel free to send me private mail (please omit
the mailing list addresses) and i will notify you the Moment it
is released.  If not, no worries; you will have to trust others
to find, report and (possibly) resolve the bugs and misfeatures.

thi