Whatis brik? Explained.

[Robert Lipe]

Neal Becker wrote:

> What's brik?

Originally, I was going to answer him privately.   But in the interest
of helping to break the Secret Code, while taking some load off our Elders,
I'm going to answer here.

Brik was a GPL'ed program in the late 80's that generated a CRC-like 
checksum on one or more files.    It's the reason for that ",brik" file
that you see in the top level of the gcc2 and egcs trees.   It gives 
users a moderately easy way to tell if they have patch errors or other
local modifications between the local copy as computed by the local
brik executable and the master copy as computed by the snapshot generator.

These days, it's in vogue to use things like md5 for such tasks.

Unfortunately, my net access is too hosed for me to quote a URL right
now, but go roam through the archives of the days when usenet was a 
viable program transport.  Search comp.sources.unix or perhaps 
comp.sources.reviewed archives for "brik".   gatekeeper.digital.com 
or ftp.uu.net would be good staring places.  You'll probably find 
it's a number of tiny (by today's standards) shar files that have 
to be glued back together.

To use it for egcs, just do a "brik -C < ,brik" and it'll chug away
and tell you what files in your source tree don't match that of the
snapshot.     It's actually a pretty small, fairly clever program.

Enjoy.

RJL