Re: Subversion & iSeries

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