Re: powerful editors versus IDEs (was: License to Steal)

["Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> In a perfect world, Configuration Management and Change Control would be
> integrated in such a way that the change history for a given module is not
> maintained as comments in the module, but as an attachment of some form that
> you can retrieve as needed.
> 
I've tried for many years on different projects to push the project's
coding "header" standard away from maintaining CM information--with
mixed results.  CM tools are powerful enough that, when properly
integrated into a well thought out CM process, a full and useful change
history of the unit can now be easily extracted from such tools.

I hate maintaining redundant information in a header, but many people
(managers and developers alike) don't trust the CM environment, don't
want to be bothered with having to learn a few simple procedures with
the tool, and/or want all the change information in the file and are
willing to accept the risk of incompleteness and inaccuracy.  (For the
latter desire, auto-generation of headers has sometimes proved a
workable compromise.)

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com