Hi,
I'm investigating CVS as a possible solution for my organization's config
management woes. So far, I like what I see, but I some questions;
hopefully someone out there can give me some advice.
Our environment is mixed win32/hpux. We are in the same boat as lots of
folks (I think,) where most past development was targeted for unix, but
the low cost of PCs and the desire for Office/Outlook on all desktops is
driving us towards NT (kicking and screaming.) Anyway, we really have two
problems: First, can we have similar build environments in unix and NT?
Second, what tool should we use for software configuration management?
I think we may be able to use GNU make in both environments with lots of
conditionals to define the correct compiler, options, etc. I hope this
will solve problem one.
On the surface, CVS seemed like the solution to problem two. It works on
unix and windows. It uses RCS's file format, so bringing our existing RCS
controlled files into CVS probably won't be hard. The problem I'm really
struggling with is that a lot of our projects include headers and link
from other projects. (The reason for this is we have a fair number of
client-server APIs built. When a program wants to be a client, it
includes from the common and client areas of the appropriate API.)
Currently, all the projects reside on the same NFS volume, so they are
visible to each other. From what I understand of CVS, projects on
networked file systems are bad. Also, when a programmer wants to work on
a project, the project's code is copied to a local filesystem. How can I
set things up so includes from other projects work? I sure don't want to
manually check out several projects just to work on one. Is there a way
to have CVS automatically check out projects (read only) that the work
project depends on? I read a little about vendor branches, but this
approach looks like it would result in a lot of duplicated code in many
of our projects.
All suggestions appreciated!
Jim Gallagher
____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.amexmail.com/?A=1
