Locating or compiling latest GNU RCS (5.10) on Windows 10

Question

I have been using RCS on Windows since a long time. The latest available version ported to Windows is 5.7 by Purdue University or ezwinports.

I would prefer to stay with RCS since I have a number of scripts using it, and I am satisfied with its features (even though I realize it is considered obsolete). I wish to continue using the latest version on Windows 10 and I know they fixed quite a few bugs in GNU RCS 5.10.

I searched far and wide, but failed to locate RCS 5.10 for Windows 10.

MSYS2's or Cygwin version will not work from Emacs or Powershell (I believe because of path incompatibilities). The same if I call rcs from WSL, with wsl run ci, etc.

I am also aware of this.

I need help locating (better option), or compiling latest RCS (5.10) on Windows 10.

Answer 1

As of 2020-11-01, MSYS2 offers RCS 5.10.0.

Commands such as ci and co do not work from PowerShell becasue they are shell scripts, and rely on the shebang to be run. Also, the refer to MSYS2 implicit path mangling like/c/, etc.

One way to deal with this is, for example, to wrap such commands in a .cmd script. In my case, I solved the path issue by creating a Junction link of my $HOME as c:/msys64/home.

Now I can happily run RCS from Emacs 27.1 on Windows 10.