Java Reference
In-Depth Information
8.1
W
HAT
Y
OU
W
ILL
L
EARN
• Why you need CVS—the problem with source code.
• How CVS solves this problem.
• Some basic CVS mechanisms:
• Importing source
• Checkout
• Commit
• Tagging
• Branch tagging
• Status
• Log
• Export
• A quick look at a CVS GUI.
8.2
S
OURCE
C
ONTROL
:W
HYS AND
H
OWS
Consider the following scenario: A customer has called with a problem in the
software that your development team released over a month ago. Your develop-
ers try to reproduce the problem on their systems without success. What version
of software is your team running? Well, there has been a lot of development
in the last month, a lot has changed. Some new features have been
added—halfway. In other words, it's close but not really the same software.
And it's far from being ready to be given to the customer as a fix-release. Well,
what's changed since the release was shipped six weeks ago? Can you find or
create a set of sources that matches exactly what the customer is running? Can
you then provide a modified version that contains only the fix necessary and
no other changes?
With such low prices for hard drives these days it is now economically
feasible to track your software releases simply by shelving an entire hard drive
with each release of your software. It could contain the source code and all the
tools in use for that version. But it does make search and comparisons a bit
difficult. Still, conceptually, this is almost what you'd like—to be able to access
an image of what your source looked like at any given point in time (for
example, when released).
