Re: Subversion and RPG source change management

Everyone:

Consider what you "give up" if you abandon maintaining source code in the OS/400 native format of source physical file members and switch to solely using an open-source version control tool such as CVS, SVN, GIT, etc. as the repository ("master copy") of all your source.

#1. you lose the ability to have changed date stamps on each line of source code. This is not as much of a "big deal" as it once may have been, since you can use tools such as "diff" that are built-into SVN, etc., to see the differences between any two versions of source. Many OS/400 or i5/OS developers are not used to these Unix style tools, and are more familiar with looking at the source lines changed dates (e.g. in SEU).

#2. you lose the member last changed date-time stamps -- in OS/400, each source member has a create date and a last changed date. This "source last changed date" is stored by the OS/400 compilers into the "OIR" information for the object (*MODULE, *PGM, *SRVPGM, *FILE, *CMD, *PNLGRP, *QMQRY, *QMFORM, etc.) so that you can easily determine the exact "version" (based on date/time stamp) of what source member this object was created from, independent of the object's create date/time stamp. This has been one of the most important (and often overlooked) features of the OS/400 platform, and AFAIK, no other platform has this capability built-in. To simply dispense with this feature, solely for the sake of being able to use an open source version control tool like CVS or SVN, etc., is probably ill-advised. ("Just close your eyes and step on the gas!") When you do a "get" from a CVS or SVN or GIT etc. repository into a source physical file member, you end up with that source member having today's date and time as the create date and the last changed date, even when you are retrieving an older version of that source member. For me, at least, this makes using CVS, SVN, GIT, etc., for "native" OS/400 source code a "non-starter."

#3. since V5R2, the ILE compilers allow to compile from source directly in the IFS, rather than having to copy the source into a source physical file member. But, if you do that, you also lose the OIR information about the source file, library, member, and source changed date/time stamp -- those fields will all be blank in the OIR for the *MODULE.

Why drag OS/400 down to the "lowest common denominator" level of OS feature-set established by Unix and Linux? Just so you can use some open-source "free" source code version control tool? :-o

SVN, CVS, and GIT, etc., are NOT "change management" tools -- they are merely source code version control tools. And just because they may be the "de facto" standard for open source projects in the Unix and Linux world does not mean they are really all that wonderful; they are merely adequate or better than anything else that is currently available (for "free") in those environments.