Re: Subversion & iSeries

Mark,

You make a good point. Maybe we are trying to stretch the tool beyond its original purpose. However, despite the fact that Subversion (SVN) was not intended to be a CM tool, I think (and correct me if I'm wrong) that it has been adopted, extended, and used as a CM tool for many projects in the Unix/Windows world.

The fact that SVN can be used as a CM tool doesn't mean that it is the best way to do CM. However, SVN is free, and widely used everywhere. I still hope that we can harness that potential and use it on the iSeries. It may be worth it, and I think that's what we are trying to explore here.

In the end, we may end up shelling out $7,000 to get a CM tool... we'll see.

Thanks for your insight!

Merry Christmas (or your Holiday of preference)!

Luis

-----Original Message-----
From: wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark S. Waterbury
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 6:09 PM
To: Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Subversion & iSeries

Hello, Luis and everyone:

CVS and SVN are "source code version control" archival tools. These are
NOT "change management" tools. This is why there is no real "work-flow"
and no concept of "promotion" (e.g. from WORK to TEST or TEST to PROD,
etc.). -- those are features you would find in a true "change
management" tool or product.

Regards,

Mark S. Waterbury

Luis Colorado 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