Re: Configuration Management for Ada on Unix

[Bob Crispen <crispen@hiwaay.net>]

Laurent Pautet wrote:

>Theodore E. Dennison <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com> wrote:
>>The project I worked on that had a UNIX/SCCS/Alsys setup just used
>>"sccs get" on every ada source file right before compilation. This
>>gets you a read-only working copy, which you can use to compile.
>
>It seems to be a rather straightforward combination of RCS (or SCCS)
>and make (something like):
>
>%.ads : RCS/%.ads,v
>        co -f $<
>
>%.adb : RCS/%.adb,v
>        co -f $<

We got a little more involved on one project I'm thinking of.  We had
shell scripts to check modules in and out that added delta lines for us
and required us to describe changes, and so on.  It was homebrew and used
sccs for a delta engine, but it wasn't terribly complicated.  A man-month
or two for a serious shell programmer would give you the most baroque,
complicated configuration management system your managers could possibly
want.

I've worked with another system that used a database and was even more
complicated, running awk scripts to change individual lines in the code
depending on the version required, and that took some time to develop.

It really just depends on what you need.  If you've got a number of
simultaneous versions and targets and are doing a real product-line set
of builds, you'll obviously need one of the professional products, while
homebrew version control will do you if you have a handful of targets
and have only a rolling 3-version system (Test, Current, and Delivery).

Note that SCCS allows you to have several directory trees.  You can have
one tree for each version, and within that trees for platforms (e.g.,
common, vme, workstation).  SCCS can then load everything down to one
big directory for each build.  Unlike the flat(ter) VMS filesystem, Unix's
filesystem can be used as a serious helper for your configuration management
tool.

Bob Crispen
crispen@hiwaay.net
speaking for myself, not my employer