Distributed Development

[Dick Dunn]

In article <144000001 at cdp>, steve at cdp.UUCP writes:
> Does anyone have tools used for doing distributed development
> on a large body of source code ?  Our development team is
> sufficiently dispersed (in four countries), that use of NFS
> or RFS is not feasible.

For some time now, Interactive has been using tools which allow us to keep
copies of sccs trees at each of our sites (CA,CO,MA) with propagation of
lock files and deltas.  Configuration files on each machine indicate where
the trees are and whether they're to be propagated to and/or from the
machine.

Propagation time obviously depends on bandwidth and frequency of connec-
tions--if you want to spend more on communications, you get smaller
windows for conflicts.  Conflicts (`get -e' of same file in two places)
*are* detected; this produces mail to an administrator who gets to sort
things out with the people doing the work.  It sounds simplistic, but
conflicts are pretty rare with even halfway-reasonable project management,
and once you have the conflict you have to get people talking anyway.

It has worked very well.  Although we use it for sccs, that's really
driven by our customers and their needs/desires/requirements.  I don't
know of any reason it couldn't be made to work with rcs.
-- 
Dick Dunn      UUCP: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd           (303)449-2870
   ...Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.