www-128.ibm.com — Version control systems, or source management systems, are an important aspect of modern software development. Not using one is like driving a car too fast: it's fun and you might get to your destination faster, but an accident is inevitable. This article provides an overview of Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems and their benefits.
Oct 10, 2006 View in Crawl 4
gclefOct 11, 2006
@sks112ClearCase isn't free (by a longshot). All of the ones mentioned in the article are. Granted, they could modify the title to say "Free/Open Version Control for Linux" to be clearer, but still: it's an easy assumption to make that Linux folks will want Free/Open tools, so there's not much point in mentioning closed products. (Note: BitKeeper isn't there, either.)
Closed AccountOct 11, 2006
Now that I think about it, software configuration management applies more to when software is ready and after deployment...Software is not configured for primary use during development - it is unit and integration tested then (which doesn't count as software conf management).This isn't an email, so I can't mark this as low priority :-(
alexjordanOct 11, 2006
These are all mere version control systems. What is needed is a real change management system, with real change packages and a tool-imposed&configurable change process. I am currently simulating it with branches and name standards and oral culture, which is obviously no good for any team bigger than three. My extensive background with real change management systems in large organizations make me feel terrible having to use toy tools like svn and cvs and vss. They replace the old "file.mycopy" trick and provide backup as a side effect, but that is not real change management.
jnarebOct 11, 2006
The information in the article is a bit stale (at least with regard to Git <a class="user" href="http://git.or.cz/),">http://git.or.cz/),</a> for example there are ready binary and source packages, and you don't need to bootstrap.
lovedaddyOct 11, 2006
We have been using subversion for almost 2 years at work. (the current uptime of the machine is just shy of 400 days - god bless a dodgy gentoo ebuild for making it require a reboot at all). It has 70 internal development staff, and some 40 external staff.As a project / build manager, the global revision numbers are very very useful - being able to give a publisher a revision number rather than some date that might or might not be the latest code at that time has made things alot easier to track.Speed wise, bringing up the commit window and doing updates seems a little slower than CVS - and the hdd usage is alot higher (keeping a clean working copy) - which is the current reasons for us not trying to use it for asset management too.The other 2 main problems I have with it are no real "delete" function (thankfully no one has ever added a 700 meg file or anything... yet.). It can be done but requires some dumping / reload of the database to achieve. The other is no merge tracking - with branches / tags being so cheap and easy to setup, you would think that merge tracking would have taken a higher priority of the SVN team.Still, its a massive step up from CVS, and with people such as the KDE team using it, fingers crossed issues get addressed and it matures into a product that can rival the best.