Re: V5R2: Source now allowed in the IFS

Steve

Just to add to your comments.

I've used both Aldon and TurnOver - both very solid products for iSeries
change management. I actually prefer TurnOver just a little - twas 3 years
ago when I had to decide.

MKS bought Silvon's product - Dave G., you know about, this? And MKS had a
suite of CMS products that Silvon's would be brought into, I think.

Both have long been working on cross-platform change management. CVS
doesn't really handle - isn't intended to - the extra stuff a true CMS
does. Great tool for versioning, if that's all you need. And it's free. ANT
adds to that, I believe, although I've not used it. But there's still a lot
of manual administration, probably. SourceSafe, again, does not handle the
"make" stuff, AFAIK. Version control, again - important but only a piece of
CMS.

Things like Aldon help control library lists for the various stages of
development and QA, handle packaging and distribution of
products/applications, archiving, versioning, all that.

All the major players are hooking into Eclipse, now, and that bodes well
for the cross-platform heaven I want. I hope they all succeed. I just wish
we could afford one of them right now.

JMVHO

Vern

At 11:38 AM 10/15/02 -0500, you wrote:

I wasn't trying to be argumentative when I made the comment about "real"
change management...I guess that everyone is entitled to their opinions
about what is "real", "good", or whatever.  I was just pointing out what
appears to be a bias.

And yes, I am biased toward solutions that exist on the iSeries.  I feel
fairly confident in saying that a PC-based change management system will
NEVER replace one like Turnover or Aldon/CMS when it comes to managing
AS/400 source and objects...there's just too much platform-specific stuff
that has to be done during promotion of objects to make it even worth
considering, IMO.  Sure, you can use a PC or Unix-based CMS to manage the
source code...but that's only a tiny fraction of the job that needs to be
performed by a CMS.

You need to archive source AND objects, for one.  What about NON-source
based objects, like Data Queues or Data Areas?  You need a facility to
manage these types of objects.  Also, you need to distribute objects from
your development system to the production system, if you have separate
boxes.  NO purely PC-based CMS can do this for you, unless you write some
supplemental iSeries code to do these tasks.

JMHO, as always
Steve Landess