Is there a modern free D?VCS that can ignore mainframe sequence numbers?

Posted by Brent.Longborough on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Brent.Longborough
Published on 2009-05-10T12:12:44Z Indexed on 2010/03/13 11:35 UTC
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80-column

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vcs

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dvcs

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mainframe

I'm looking at migrating a large suite of IBM Assembler Language programs, from a vcs based on "filenames include version numbers", to a modern vcs which will give me, among other things, the ability to branch and merge.

These files have 80-column records, the last 8 columns being an almost-meaningless sequence number.

For a number of reasons which I don't really want to waste space by going into, I need the vcs to ignore (but hopefully preserve in some well-defined manner) the sequence number columns, and to diff and patch based only on the contents of the first 72 columns.

Any ideas?

Just to clarify "ignore but preserve": I accept it's a bit vague, as I haven't fully collected my ideas yet.

It would be something along the lines of this:

"When merging/patching, if one side has sequence numbers, output them; if more-than-one side has sequence numbers, use those present in file (1|2|3)"

Why do I want to preserve sequence numbers? First, they really are sequence numbers. Second, I want to reintegrate this stuff back onto the mainframe, where sequence numbers can be terribly significant. (Those of you who know what "SMP/E" means will understand. Those who don't, be happy, but tremble...)

I've just realised I hadn't accepted an answer. Difficult choice, but @Noldorin comes closest to where I have to go.

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