Have you looked at Rational Team Concert? One of the options within RTC
is supposed to be to use SVN as source control. There is supposed to be
an open-source version of RTC. I've only read about and had demos of
RTC; I haven't tried it in a production environment.
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Arco Simonse
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2010 11:34 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Subversion and RPG source change management
A few years ago I started to use SVN. After being out of RPG for a
while, I came back on it in the midst of 2009 and then started again to
use the SVN / RPG combination. Although I like SVN very much and I'm
using SVN myself for RPG source I would not advise it. You have to be
very very consequent with your source synchronization with the i, and it
is a lot of work to keep the file/member structure organized in SVN.
There are a few points that makes it difficult to work together with i
sources.
1. At the very first you have to completely change your mindset. If you
use SVN for your source, then your source master lives in the SVN
repository.
You do not have your master source libs on the i, but in the SVN
repository.
I have seen that this is very difficult to remember for RPG programmers.
But it is necessary to follow this rule, or else your SVN implementation
will not work.
2. SVN is oriented for use with flat files, and SVN knows nothing about
the i's library structure. So there is no way that SVN will recognize
that some source member on your i has changed. Only solution for that
would be if someone writes programs that can read and write to an SVN
administrative directory. But that does not exist, so you have to work
around that. If we could compile our RPG/CL/C source from the IFS (which
is not completely implemented yet) that would open many more doors,
because you can then have your working copy on the IFS and SVN can deal
with the IFS.
3. For my own situation as alternative I have decided to use iProjects
in RDP to maintain my working copies from SVN. This works but gives many
side effects that you have to deal with. An iProject splits the original
source member in an RPGLE source text file and the information about the
source is put in an xml file, which lives in a separate folder in your
project. This is a nightmare to maintain when you want to move files
between SVN branches.
4. SVN (and most other SCM's) is folder oriented. This means that when
you want to checkout a few sources from the repository, you'll get the
whole tree. So if you want to create an iProject working copy to edit 10
sources from QRPGLESRC, you will get all lets say 1000 sourcemembers.
Yes, there are ways to work around that, but it's a lot of extra work.
The main reason I have continued to use SVN / RPG until now, is that as
a one programmer shop I can't afford a real SCM package. And for
versioning your sources it works very well. You can work with every
source version you want (provided you have committed as much as needed).
But I don't see a future for SVN with sources that are in the library
system, unless there's some software written to manage an i-side SVN
administrative directory.
Best regards,
Arco Simonse
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