Source control and versions of third party source

M

Marcus Leon

Hello, we're looking for advice with a source control issue. Can
anyone offer any suggestions?

We use AllFusion Harvest for source control. We currently get a new
release of a large software product from a vendor every quarter. This
release comes in the form of Java code, build scripts, etc. We
sometimes modify this code ourselves so we would like this code in
source control.

We are wondering how best to handle dealing with new releases. We are
assuming that our modifications to the code will have been added to the
new releases by the vendor so new releases won't overwrite our changes.
We're just not sure how to properly deal with new versions.

I believe you can label the current code base to indicate a specific
release. But what if release 1 includes file X and release 2 has
removed this file from the project. If we copy release 2 over release
1 then file X will still be there which could cause problems. Or
should we delete release 1 and then add release 2?
Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks
 
K

kevinhanna

I'm not familiar with All Fusion Harvest at all. In CVS this would not
be a problem. You could branch the two versions. The removed file
would not be in the new branch.
 
K

KevinHanna

I'm *assuming* a label is equivalent to CVS's tag. It's basically a
snap shot of the code at a certain time. I will tag a project Alpha,
Beta, RC1 et cetera. A linear progression of code.

A branch on the other hand is for different versions. You can go back
and make independant changes on version 1 while working on version to
and create patches if the change should be applied to both versions.

Againg this is a CVS centric point of view. You may want to try
throwing this question at Compter Associates support or a group more
targeted towards version control (if such a beast exists). I'm not
sure whether my comments will be helpful or not as Harvest may have a
completely different way of handling what CVS calls tags and branches.

Kevin
 
T

Thomas Weidenfeller

KevinHanna said:
Againg this is a CVS centric point of view. You may want to try
throwing this question at Compter Associates support or a group more
targeted towards version control (if such a beast exists).

comp.software.config-mgmt (I think the group also has an FAQ worth reading).

/Thomas
 
M

Marcus Leon

Thanks for your response Kevin. So, as I understand it, are you
suggesting the following approach?

-Have one source control repository
-Have one branch for vendor code
-On main branch we have our own code that calls APIs in vendor software
-We merge vendor code into main branch and then do a build
-For new releases of vendor code, we add them to the vendor branch and
add a label to indicate the new release.

Are you assuming that the source control tool takes care of labelling
the new release so old files are not included in the labelling of the
new release?

If we want to modify the vendor source would we do that on the vendor
branch or on the main branch? How do you ensure you don't overwrite
your changes when you get a new release from the vendor?

Do you even need to merge? Can't you use the source control tool to
say "put the latest copy of the vendor code and also my code on my
system" and then run your build?

Thanks again
 

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