Re: Is it a good idea to use CVS for this??

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, October 15, 2001 at 14:30:55 (-0400), address@hidden wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Is it a good idea to use CVS for this??
>
> If it's not too much trouble, could you possibly elaborate just a little
> more on this? Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a cvs whiz to see exactly
> why this is obvious.  And I would really like to have some solid answers
> for
> the people here, who want to to this.

Others have said quite a bit about this already....

This isn't a CVS-specific issue either.

You really never want to track changes to derived files -- only to their
sources.

It makes no sense to track incremental changes to derived files --
there's really no such thing as an "incremental" change to a derived
file, especially not when it has more than one source (which implicitly
all but the most complex do, since even the compiler is a component).

You want to verify that builds are reproducible, and in all but the
simplest cases the best way to do that is by observing the behaviour of
the product as it executes.

Once you have reproducible builds the derived files (intermediate and
final product targets) are all irrelevant usless extra baggage that msut
be ignored by the _source_ code change management process.

So, archive the installable product files for your milestone builds in
tar/zip/cdrom/whatever images and keep all derived files a million miles
away from your CVS repository.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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