Re: Multi-user working directories

[David H. Thornley]

address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Maybe I didn't explain things completely.  With the Open Software model, the 
> net
> result of a development is a set of source code.  In a closed system, we must
> ship executables created from the source. (I'm not making any statement here 
> as
> to either model being better so everyone put those flamethrowers away...).
> 
I don't see why this affects anything.  Why would the need to
compile before shipping affect source control?

> In our case, everyone does have their own "sandbox" to develop source.  But at
> some point, the resulting software changes must be put together in to a 
> release
> to be sent to customers.  The area I'm talking about is this.  We can't send 
> 10
> different sandboxes to the customer, we need to send a single set of 
> executable.
> This one "official release" copy is responsible for creating that final copy 
> (or
> in this case fixes to it) to be sent to a customer.
> 
Right.  So, you need some way of keeping an official release copy
up to date.  What do you ship?  We tag everything before we ship,
so we can export a controlled copy.  (Too many things change too
fast to expect a consistent version otherwise.)  You may do things
differently, and may want to ship the head branch.  I don't know,
and it really doesn't matter.

The Cederqvist et al. manual has a brief section on keeping a checked-
out copy

http://www.cvshome.com/docs/manual/cvs_18.html#SEC171

and while this refers to loginfo it seems to me you might do
something with taginfo, to check out files into a standard
location when they have tags that are moved.  This looks like
a job for a Perl script to me.

It seems to me that 
> It could be said that whomever makes a fix should build everything and ship 
> it.
> We're talking about thousands of source files that can take upwards of 6 hours
> to compile, not to mention the 300Mb of resulting object code.  It would be
> somewhat wasteful to recreate all this for every fix we ship.
> 
And yet this is what we do.  We have several people whose job it
is to ship what the client needs.  They maintain their own exports
and compile and ship.

However, if you have an automatically checked-out version, then
you can presumably have several people who can make and install
the source code.  It seems to me that that would solve your
problem.  Alternately, have a special username that is used
only to maintain the master source files.
-- 
David H. Thornley                          Software Engineer
at CES International, Inc.:  address@hidden or (763)-694-2556
at home: (612)-623-0552 or address@hidden or
http://www.visi.com/~thornley/david/