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From: Erstad@HI-MULTICS.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: DSEE Benefits / Converting to DSEE
Message-ID: <870624015716.436846@HI-MULTICS.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 23-Jun-87 21:57:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: HI-MULTI.870624015716.436846
Posted: Tue Jun 23 21:57:00 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jun-87 06:51:06 EDT
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This is mostly response to Robert Reed's comments regarding DSEE and
software development.  Two things should probably be made clear.  First,
I have no direct experience with RCS and will not make a direct
comparison based on what little I know.  Second, I am not trying to say
anyone "should" need any of the DSEE capability.  What I am saying is
that it has proved useful in our environment.  I'm not out to sell
anyone on anything.

Shared binaries save us LOTS of disk space.  I did a rough estimate
based on our common binaries and the number of people which would/might
be replicating them and at a minimum our disk space requirements would
increase by 100 MB.  Even though we have 7+ Gig, this is a lot to us.
This also saves a lot of build time when new releases are made.

There are several ways to isolate a development effort from unwanted
changes.  One is to use a command which will identify all the current
versions of source modules at the start of an effort.  In one's thread,
a statement of the form

   [dave_wants_these_versions]

will automatically use only those versions.  In general, I don't bother
since we tend not to make non-upward compatible changes (in theory at
least...)

Threads are very useful if, for reasons beyond your control, you are
forced to field multiple versions of code either temporarily or
permanently.  To date, we have never wanted to provide build control we
have not been able to do within DSEE.  The naming capability mentioned
earlier is one example of a useful capability of threads.  After
performing a build which is to be released, a command like

   NAME VERSION build_name  this_build_went_to_freds_group

allows me to readily rebuild the same build by using a meaningful name.
Additionally, I can use all of these items EXCEPT grab one module from a
different version, and so forth.  Multiple lines of descent are also
supported by the threads.

The multiple builder capability refers to having multiple nodes compile
in parallel.  This hasn't been released to me yet, so I can't comment on
the implementation, but for us this is a nice-to-have rather than a
critical item.  I can see where it is useful for sites with millions of
lines of code (like Apollo) rather than 100s of thousands of lines (like
us)

Dave Erstad

Honeywell SSED