Re: Subversion & iSeries

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luis

Was just talking with my co-developer in the last couple weeks - ant 
can probably handle a lot of things - including changed source and 
dependent objects like LFs over PFs - I don't have details. Arcad - a 
newish kid on the block of change management software for iSeries, 
claims to use ant in its promotion process, if I read their site correctly.

Looking at the future!! Askance!!
Vern

At 04:12 PM 12/21/2007, you wrote:

> Justin,
>
> Sorry, but that is what I'm talking about when I say that most of 
> the documentation just show the very limited workflow that you have 
> described, which doesn't take in account many things about the 
> typical workflows in iSeries development.
>
> Subversion was designed with the Java/Unix/Windows world in mind, 
> and that kind of workflow do not translate directly to the 
> RPG/COBOL/CL iSeries world.
>
> Many iSeries developers like me prefer to work using development 
> libraries (sometimes their own library, sometimes a development 
> library, and others prefer ad-hoc libraries for each project). 
> ISeries developers cannot run RPG or COBOL on their PC's... they 
> need to manipulate library lists to test in isolated environments.
>
> A typical iSeries application may have hundreds or thousands of 
> members. For an iSeries developer, a "project" is usually a small 
> set of programs that need to be modified to fix/update/add 
> functionality to an application.
>
> Moving compiled code to a separate QA and production environment is 
> awkward (or even impossible) to be done with Subversion. For 
> instance, once the tested source code has been compiled and 
> committed, there is no easy way (at least not that I know of) to 
> move the binary objects to production with the iSeries. You would 
> have to move the source code to those environments, and some 
> companies do not want or allow compilation in production machines. 
> And assuming that it was possible to compile in the production 
> environment, it would be necessary to detect what members where 
> modified and should be recompiled. Windows/Unix use utilities like 
> "make" and "ant" to do that, but that's not available (that I know 
> of) on the iSeries world to deal with RPG/COBOL code.
>
> I think that it may be possible to translate the iSeries development 
> workflow to Subversion, but some serious thinking and maybe some 
> tweaking would be required.
>
> Luis