worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (06/07/89)
Sorry about the cross-posting, but there's no newsgroup that is home for this article. My company is involved in the development of a number of software products that involve common components. We are getting to the point where we need a good configuration management system. Before we write our own, I thought I would check to see if there exists one out there already. What we are looking for is a system that supports all of the standard requirements: multiple lines of development; maintenance of multiple variants of a single file; assembling of components into multiple products; archiving of old versions; building of versions with altered compiler switches; etc. Each requirement seems quite reasonable and reasonably easy in isolation; the combination means that the system will be rather complicated. Just the conceptual design will be tricky enough. The two commercial products I've seen are Sun's NSE and Apollo's DSEE, but they are specific to those manufacturers' operating systems. What I would like is a system that is built on top of vanilla (Berkeley) Un*x, so we aren't locked into a particular vendor. It seems that such a system could be built straightforwardly, but it would take several man-years of effort, i.e., Serious Bucks. So I figure it would be quicker and cheaper to buy a system, if one exists out there. Please mail replies to "worley@compass.com" (or "compass!worley@think.com"), since we don't get these newsgroups. I am willing to digest the replies and forward to those who are interested. Dale -- Dale Worley, Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com "The United States has entered an anti-intellectual phase in its history, perhaps most clearly seen in our virtually thought-free political life." -- David Baltimore