Frequently Asked Question List for TeX
Usage
Version control using RCS, CVS or the like
If you use RCS, CVS, Subversion, Bazaar or Git to maintain
your (La)TeX documents under version control, you may need some
mechanism for including the version details in your document, in such
a way that they can be typeset (that is, rather than just hiding them
inside a comment).
The most complete solution for RCS and CVS is to use the
(LaTeX) package rcs, which allows you to parse and
display the contents of RCS keyword fields in an extremely
flexible way. The package rcsinfo is simpler, but does most
of what you want, and some people prefer it; it is explicitly
compatible with LaTeX2HTML.
If, however, you need a solution which works without using external packages, or which will work in Plain TeX, then you can use the following minimal solution:
\def\RCS$#1: #2 ${\expandafter\def\csname RCS#1\endcsname{#2}}
\RCS$Revision: 1.47 $ % or any RCS keyword
\RCS$Date: 2014/01/28 18:17:23 $
...
\date{Revision \RCSRevision, \RCSDate}
If you are a user of Subversion, the package svn
may be for you. It has explicit cleverness about dealing with dates:
\documentclass{<foo>}
...
\usepackage{svn}
\SVNdate $Date$
\author{...}
\title{...}
...
\begin{document}
\maketitle
...
\end{document}
will (once subversion has committed a copy of the document)
cause \maketitle use the date that has been written into the
$Date$ keyword.
Another alternative for Subversion users is the
svninfo package, which has much the same mechanisms as does
svn but with a rather different focus. Svninfo
does the date trick that svn performs (controlled by a
package option), and can set up page foot-lines using
package fancyhdr. There isn’t much to
choose between the two packages: you should read the packages’
documentation to see which suits you best.
An alternative script-based approach to version control has been taken
by the vc bundle, that in certain situations might work more
reliably than any of the packages mentioned above. The vc
bundle supports Bazaar, Git and Subversion usage and works with both LaTeX and
Plain TeX. Note that vc is the only option that
currently claims to support Bazaar-controlled repositories.
Finally, for now, the gitinfo package supports
Git-controlled documents.
FAQ ID: Q-RCS