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

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

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.

A good CM system I've both developed on and used, had change requests
associated with the check-out/in process. If you had questions about what
changes had been made to a module, you could always find the collection of
change requests that have ever impacted it and could retrieve older versions
of the module to compare against. That way the code (or any other artifact
within the CM system) had no clutter that wasn't relevant to its current
purpose, but you could find out how it had evolved if it was necessary to do
so. At *most* you might see someone having put a comment in the banner of a
module that referenced a CR# - but I never believed any of that anyway
because it was not always up to date. It was far better to ask the computer
to fill you in on the module history.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil> wrote in message
news:mailman.989885292.1844.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
>
> While that sounds perfectly reasonable and better than our current
> approach, we are never allowed to go back and do that.  We have to
> have a justification for checking the unit out, updating it, and
> checking it back in.  To clean up the code is not sufficient.  So,
> some poor guy down the road will have to maintain it with the noise
> in place.
>
> I would rather not put it there in the first place.
>