As I mentionned in my previous email (with another question), I've
recently been put in charge of reorganizing my company's code management
system. I have a clean slate to work with (ie I don't have to worry
about saving the old code history, just the new stuff), but I have a
tonne of code to pour through and organize.
Just to give you a bit of background, my company primarily makes Air
Traffic Messaging systems for aviation authorities around the world.
Each of our customers has a mix of the various subsystems we offer all
on one box (usually an Alpha though we're migrating to Linux as well).
After much debate among our developers, we decided that trying to keep
all of our customers in synch with the same code was a lost cause, so
we've got code drift between our customers that we have to handle. It
also means that we don't have to worry about merging customer code with
eachother or with the Bleeding edge code.
We also concluded that even though we are not going to keep the
customer's in synch, we still want to be able to easily diff between
code Customer A has with code Customer B has or with our new
Developement Code (our Bleeding Edge code). Ideally we would also like
to be able to compare the Linux version of a system with the Unix
version of a system.
Basically, for example, we have the following:
System_A ( Linux Version)
System_A ( Unix Version )
System_B (Linux Ver)
System_B (Unix Ver)
All 4 versions are different and are Bleeding Edge.
Cust_1 has a Linux box with System_A and System_B installed
Cust_2 also has a Linux box, but only with System_A installed (and a
slightly different version then what Cust_1 has )
Cust_3 has a Unix box with only System_A installed.
We also want to be able to easily check out all the code a customer has
on their machine without having to chase down other sources to remind us
that say Cust_1 has both System_A and System_B installed.
After rereading the docs on the CVSHOME website hundreds of time,
performing many experiments and redesigning my organization plans many
times, I came up with the following method:
The CVS Tree is organized as follows:
$CVSROOT
|
- - - > (Operating System)
| (This indicates a subdirectory)
- - - > (System)
\ (Note this indicates a branch)
- - - > (Customer code)
This forces us to break our code up by operating system, making it
difficult to do diffs of versions of our code across OS's, but otherwise
it meets most of our requirements.
To checkout all the code a customer has on their machine, we can just
cvs co -b (Customer Code) (Operating System)
To get a particular subsystem a customer has it's:
cvs co -b (Customer Code) (Operating System)/(System)
etc...
I'm not comfortable with this setup however (If I was I wouldn't be
bugging you with it now would I? :)
For one thing, unless you specify a directory to check out into ( cvs co
-d (new_dir), all the code ends up looking like the same directory tree
structure. (OS)/(System). Since we do a lot of work on shared machines,
this can be a major problem at times as people may not realize the code
they are manipulating is the code they are expecting. (At least not
until I get them into the habit of cvs status'ing stuff). As long as I
can get the -d flag to work on a cvs co from a remote repository though
this won't be a big deal.
The main concern I have, is bleeding edge code (ie the code at the head
of the Trunk). In all the scripts I've made for others to use the CVS
tree with, I had to set up a special flag so that the script could
handle code from the Trunk, but I am not comfortable using the flags,
and in some cases this is dangerous.
In particular, commiting changes has become a small nightmare for me.
I've discovered that commit -r (branchname) works great, since it aborts
if the code isn't all uptodate for (branchname). (We don't want people
commiting changes into another branch without first making sure they
update it).
Commiting to the trunk though is the source of my concerns. I can't
simply do a cvs commit command because if there is changed code from
other branches in that area, it will commit those changes to those
branches as well as the files for the trunk.
I briefly examined Modules, and they sort've seemed to do what I want,
but they left behind sticky tags that made commit's messy.
Earlier today, I thought I was on to something with the Vendor tag I
used when importing code. I noticed that if you checked out under the
vender tag and commited changes, the changes also applied to the Trunk
code as far as I could tell. Sadly the reverse wasn't true, or else it
would work great; namely code checked out with no tags did not make
changes to vender tagged code when commited.
If I was certain that everyone would always use the scripts I've
developed, then I wouldn't be as concerned. But I already know that at
least 1 other developer besides myself will be using the straight cvs
commands right off the bat, and others will migrate to the cvs
commandline instead of the scripts as time goes by; so by planning for
that now, I'm hoping to keep this from becoming too much of a nightmare.
Summary
Basically, to try and boil my ramblings down to some more concise
points, I'm wondering the following:
1. Given the way our code is broken up right now, can anyone think of
possible ways I could try to improve my design? (In particular, I would
love to squeeze the operating systems back together so we could diff
between Linux and Unix easier).
2. Is there a flag or something I can pass in with CVS commit so that
when I am commiting changes to the Trunk, it will abort if any of the
code belongs to a Branch.
2b. Actually, is there a tag I can always call with -r that will always
point to the head of the trunk and that works with all the basic CVS
commands that allow -r ?
3. And of course, just to reiterate the problem that brought me to this
list in the first place, is there a way to specify what directory code
will be checked out into on a local machine when you have a remote
repository? Using cvs co -d is giving me errors. (See my other message
for more details)
Thank you in advance for any advice you give me.
--
Terry Spafford
Software Engineer
Global Weather Dynamics Inc
Monterey, California, USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.gwdi.com
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