Re: Keeping different platforms in sync?

[Mike Castle]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 03:58:38PM +0100, Stephen Jowitt wrote:
> This would be easy to do if the developers committed the source in
> between
> stages 1 and 2, but they don't want to do that as it is a busy tree and
> would break
> others' builds.

This IS the usual approach, however.  And it often is less problematic than
you fear.

However, you could try the following.

Have the developers work on a branch, and check things in, and out on the
other machine.  They can go back and forth on that particular branch until
everything works on all platforms.  Then they can merge that into the main
branch.

You could have a branch per developer or group or something like that.  

In my experience, however, there is rarely, if any, need to do this.
Unless you have been having regular problems with this happening, I think
you are trying to put in procedures to solve a non-existent problem.

If you are having regular problems, I'd be interested in knowing what they
are, as I think there might be offered up other ways of solving this.

I would tend to think that cross-platform breakage like this would happen
less often than logical breakage caused by interaction between various bits
of code.  That is, you go through all of the effort of making sure your
changes work on all platforms, and then you find out that, when you update
to make sure no one elses changes interfere's with yours, you find out that
broke something.

mrc
-- 
     Mike Castle      address@hidden      www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different"); -- gcc