Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!brspyr1!tim
From: tim@brspyr1.BRS.Com (Tim Northrup)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Coordinating Software Development (long)
Message-ID: <2527@brspyr1.BRS.Com>
Date: 4 Feb 88 22:55:08 GMT
References: <1664@desint.UUCP>
Organization: BRS Information Technologies, Latham NY
Lines: 46

in article <1664@desint.UUCP>, geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) says:
| 
| In article <1315@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> jonesb@calgary.UUCP (Bill Jones) writes:
| 
|> Okay, suppose your company is working on the next release of a product
|> already in the field.  An important customer reports a critical bug,
|> ...
|> 
| RCS supports this very nicely;  you simply create a branch for the bug fix
| while development continues on the main path.  RCS even provides the "-j"
| switch (admittedly a very hard switch to use correctly) to help you merge
| that fix back into the main branch later.  (You can also use System V's
| sdiff program, or Larry Wall's patch program, to achieve similar results).
| 
| I believe you can also do this with SCCS, though I haven't personally
| created an SCCS branch while another revision was actually checked out.
| -- 
| 	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   {uunet,trwrb}!desint!geoff

Yes, RCS and SCCS can both do this, but it doesn't solve the problem.

What  happens  is that the ongoing work for the next release already has
some things changed (enhancements, fixes, whatever).  It is  often  very
difficult  to  make  a  "quick fix" for a customer in the field once new
release work begins without getting unwanted/untested code into it.

Once new release work has begun, unless you have a parallel set of
code which contains only the currently released product, you need
to extract an older revision EVERYTHING that has changed from
RCS/SCCS/whatever, not just the module you are making a fix to.

For this reason, we maintain separate areas for each release.  Yeah, it
takes more disk space, and yeah you have to make the fix in more than
one place (the release the customer has, and the next release), but
it requires a lot less work than extracting back revisions of everything
from from SCCS, making the fix, recompiling, and magically merging the
fix back into SCCS (and praying that it merged it correctly).

-- Tim

{ Did this posting answer anything, or just make it worse? :-}

-- 
tim@brspyr1.BRS.Com
uunet!steinmetz!brspyr1!tim
============================================    Tim "The Enchanter" Northrup