Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!amdahl!johnm
From: johnm@uts.amdahl.com (John Murray)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Source Code Control
Keywords: NSE DSEE Sun
Message-ID: <18MZ02qG393v01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Date: 27 Jun 89 23:42:03 GMT
References: <133@tirnan.UUCP> <39400029@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <10217@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 35

In article <10217@polya.Stanford.EDU>, maslen@polya.Stanford.EDU (Thomas Maslen) writes:
>  [...suggests the folllowing as a reference for NSE]
> 
> 	"Object Management in a CASE Environment" by E. Adams, M. Honda,
> 	and T. Miller, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference
> 	on Software Engineering, Pittsburgh, May 1989.

I believe one/more of the authors also wrote a discussion of NSE
in a recent issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Another source of NSE info is the technical report produced by Sun itself.
which was researched and written by William Courington. Contact your local
Sun salesbody for a copy, I would think.

The problem of merging/reconciling revisions made by different people
still involves human interaction in NSE. As far as I can see, the
essential difference in NSE is the human interface with the person
doing the merging job. It seems that, in most auto-merging systems,
data is assumed to be "auto-merge"able unless the two revisions
hit the same lines of code. When that happens, then the human
controller must make a decision. NSE does appear to make this
operation fairly user-friendly.

Revision editing systems like IBM's VM/CMS UPDATE, which works with
the standard editor XEDIT, can fairly easily be contrived to do a
similar job of merging disparate revisions, while requesting the
user to resolve individual line conflicts.

The essential difficulty with any form of auto-merge is not handling
the case of two developers revising the SAME LINE of source. It's
really how to ensure that Jack's change to line 25 is FUNCTIONALLY
COMPATIBLE with Jill's change to line 75.

- John Murray, Amdahl Corp.
  (My own opinions only. No Amdahl endorsement intended.)