Re: Any Real time examples of Branching, Please!!!

[Pierre Asselin]

Wim Kerkhoff <address@hidden> writes:

>I'm interested in this well. We've recently moved to CVS, and I'm
>working on massively re-writing all our build scripts to support this.
>We use a scheme similiar to your Dev-Stage-Production environment. 

>How do you plan to handle versioning?  On the old system we used a 4
>digit build number for each distributed file as well as each
>distribution. Ie, periodically make a release (e.g. Build 3200), but
>regularly we release new versions of files via an update system within
>the product. So, if they do an update today a new foo.jar might get
>pulled in with a build number of 2783, or a new docs.pdf with a build
>number of 1087. This has come to mean nothing, especially as a component
>gets moved up from Dev to Stage, it takes over the build number of the
>previous build number in Stage plus 1.

This seems to be a distribution issue as much as a versioning
problem.

Where is the build number stored?  Directly in the file?  For source
files (foo.jar but not doc.pdf) you can embed a $Name$ keyword in a
comment, or even a displayable string.  If you do a cvs export of your
tree (also cvs checkout, I think), the keyword is expanded with
the tag you specified in the -r option.  So one solution to your
problem is to distribute your releases with cvs export.

The $Name$ keyword is not expanded during a "cvs update" of a
checked-out sandbox, even if you specify a tag.  I sometimes wish
it were, but it isn't.  If you "distribute" by having your customers
update a sandbox, I don't know how to embed meaningful numbers in
your files.  However, the sandbox owner can still see what he's got by
running cvs status, say, from the sandbox.

"cvs export" works fine for big releases, but it becomes clumsy to
use if you issue little patchoids all the time.  Updating a sandbox
works better for these informal releases, but they are closer to
the bleeding edge.

The .pdf files are more difficult.  If they are generated from text
sources, embed $Name$ in them, processing it if necessary.  I've done
that with LaTeX, for example.  If you use a WYSIWYG tool to edit the
pdfs you're stuck with the usual limitations CVS has with binary
files.  Can't do much.

--
Pierre Asselin
Westminster, Colorado


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