[comp.sys.dec] Need help finding a revision control system

jsa@jsa.inel.gov (James S. Albano) (11/02/90)

Has RCS been ported to VMS?  Are there any other revision control
systems which would be available on UNIX (HP-UX) and VMS platforms?
Commercial or otherwise?  As you can well imagine, it would be
politically expedient to choose a system which can run on both
platforms.

Please respond to me directly using snail mail or electronic mail
address below and I will summarize to the net.

Jim Albano
Mail Stop 7114
EG&G Idaho
Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415

jsa@inel.gov

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stachour@sctc.com (Paul Stachour) (11/07/90)

jsa@jsa.inel.gov (James S. Albano) writes:

>Has RCS been ported to VMS?  Are there any other revision control
>systems which would be available on UNIX (HP-UX) and VMS platforms?
>Commercial or otherwise?  As you can well imagine, it would be
>politically expedient to choose a system which can run on both
>platforms.

I have used both RCS and SCCS in the past.  I have also recently
used PVCS (Polytron Version Control System).  They indicate
that they have DOS, unix, and VMS Versions.  I used the DOS
version for 6 months.  We found only a few small bugs.
Polytron promised to ship us updates that fixed the bugs,
but I rotated to another organization several weeks after the
bug-reports, I asssume they were shipped/recieved/fixes.

However, even PVCS isn't good enough for what I need.  
Please see the following post also.   ...Paul
-- 
Paul Stachour         Secure Computing Technology Corp
stachour@sctc.com      1210 W. County Rd E, Suite 100           
		 	   Arden Hills, MN  55112
                             [1]-(612) 482-7467

stachour@sctc.com (Paul Stachour) (11/07/90)

Looking for a different and better configuration management system.

Here at SCTC, we have been doing a rather traditional form of 
configuration management of our software and documentation,
namely a base revision-control system (SCCS) with a set of
locally developed procedures laid on top.


Assuming we can find a product which runs on our hardware
and software platform (Sun/Unix + HPUX , X-Windows) and
integrates well with our current tools (C, Ada, gcc, emacs,
...), we'd like to move to something better.


The product that we are looking for needs to be able to:

  1) Handle traditional revisions, including branches,
     n-way differences, and n-way merges.

  2) Handle not only line-oriented ascii text, but be
     able to store, retrieve, take differences and merges
     such non-text items such as pictures and other
     similar bit-items.

  3) Provide change-advisories at a reasonably low-level
     to aid the maintenance process. [Example: Pgmr A
     changes the interface to function MsgQ_Add in the
     MsgQ module.  Upon attempt to store same, she is
     told that this will invalidate section 2.3 of the
     programmer reference card and section 4.7 of the
     reference manual.  Even better, within the editor
     she can ask for cross-references between the code
     she is changing to the documentation that it affects.
     She can also ask for semi-automatic checkout of the
     affected material.]  This includes automatic 
     notifications to parties affected by a given change.

  4) Have a programmable-interface to allow us to write
     C-programs, Ada-Programs, shell-scripts, ... to
     retrieve process and management information from CM.

If you have any experiences (good, bad, OK) in this area,
please mail to "stachour@sctc.com" (alternatively to
"stachour@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu if your mailer cannot reach
sctc.com).  I will summarize to the net, paraphrasing
your input to remove all identifying information.
  
-- 
Paul Stachour         Secure Computing Technology Corp
stachour@sctc.com      1210 W. County Rd E, Suite 100           
		 	   Arden Hills, MN  55112
                             [1]-(612) 482-7467