Read only Source trees?

[Andy Glew]

If you don't want to be able to prepare all the binaries
simultaneously, use SCCS or RCS and version names, with a different
name (or set of names) for each different binary version.
    In general, version names can be divided into two classes:
historical names, which once put in place never change, and current
names, like 'Latest-Greatest-Version-For-Foo', which change every time
an update or bugfix is made.


If you want to be able to prepare all the binaries simultaneously, try
using link farms - whether symlinks or hardlinks depends on your
situation.
    Create a single, central, RCS tree.
    Create several "views" of the source tree, containing the current
source for a particular version.  Share files common to more than one
view using links. Let every developer have her own view.

In the paper "Boxes, Links, and Parallel Trees: Elements of a
Configuration Management System", USENIX Workshop Proceedings,
Software Management.  USENIX Association, April 3-4, 1989, New
Orleans, Louisiana, I describe such a CM system I devised for UNIX
system development at Gould.  IMHO it was pretty good - developers who
got used to it recreated it on their own when we moved from BSD to
System V.
    As I recall at the workshop, half of the audience thought it was a
really neat idea, and the other half though it was all old hat.
"Doesn't everybody do things that way".
    It featured, in particular, RCS wrappers to move between several
overlaid RCS trees, hardlink cloning (saved space and permitted
chroot), and chroot "boxes" to totally isolate one developer from
another developers changes which might happen to get installed on the
development system by accident...  (reducing problems like "I didn't
think my compiler bugfix would cause you to spend a week chasing down
a bug in the OS"...)
    
There are a number of commercial systems out there, but rolling your
own (1) isn't hard, and (2) gets you more features than most
commercial systems I've seen.

--
Andy Glew, a-glew at uiuc.edu [get ph nameserver from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu:net/qi]