RonPetersen wrote:
>
> I am trying to find out if CVS can do the following:
>
> 1. Does it support COBOL/370 and Assembler source code?
It supports source code in text formats very well. I wouldn't
expect problems.
> 2. Are there any limitations to the number of developers that can
> be making changes to a program concurrently?
No.
> 3. Is there a mainframe interface to Panvalet?
Not unless somebody wrote one specially for it, and I haven't
heard of such.
> 4. Is there a mainframe build and compile component?
There is no build and compile component. That is explicitly
expected to be supplied by the user.
> 5. Can CVS do PC syntax checks of all of the different types of
> supported source code?
No. It supports text, and has no internal idea whether it is
storing haikus or COBOL.
> 6. Is there an automatic merging of source code when several
> developers (working in the same program) migrate their changes to
> various stages in the testing life cycle (i.e. unit, system
> and customer acceptance testing)? If merging of these program
> changes can only be done manually, is there any limitations to the
> number of versions which can be merged together?
>
I'm not completely sure what you mean here. Around here, we do
the unit testing in programmer local directories, and when that's
finished, put it into the source tree. We developers then pass
it on to testing and the project engineers, and fix problems as
they find them. New development is done on the head branch, which
is generally not shipped; every so often, we cut off what we've got
as a branch, and use it as a release. After that, fixes are generally
done on the branch, and merged to head.
If you require a system to do all of this right out of the box, then
CVS isn't going to work for you. Most or all of this can be done
with externally written programs (I use Perl), which can either be
distributed to developers to use instead of the raw cvs commands,
or can be invoked by certain "hooks" in CVS. In that way, CVS
can probably be made to do everything you want, provided that you
have the necessary external programs (like a syntax checker and
something resembling "make") - and, of course, the proper interface
to Panvalet (which I haven't used in well over twenty years).
CVS is not a commercial mainframe product, and is never going to be.
(The license forbids making it into a commercial product, for one
thing.) It is Unix-centric open source written in C. Expect a
culture clash. :-)
--
David H. Thornley Software Engineer
at CES International, Inc.: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (612)-694-2556
at home: (612)-623-0552 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] or
http://www.visi.com/~thornley/david/
