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Subject: Project Management
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

While a little off topic, I feel that it is worth our having a discussion on 
project management. Source control, and the like ...

Current discussion on 'git' highlights the fact that there is no clear solution 
to source control. The switch TO SVN was pushed through even though a few 
problems with that were then coming to light and now that move is probably 
questionable. Projects that had not jumped have now put that on hold since DVCS 
is obviously the next step, but none of the current solutions are ideal and each 
have as many minus as plus points.

The real problem that I am finding is that all of these 'systems' work on the 
basis that we are handling source code which will then be compiled. Managing 
code that is not compiled becomes something of a mess especially when it would 
be nice to maintain file versions in those script files, and running a 'build' 
process to restore the tidy CVS type headers then makes things difficult between 
different DVCS systems. Many core DVCS developers simply do not understand that 
there is NOT a final binary distribution?

Personally I've been getting into something of a mess trying to manage 
distributing PHP projects that are version controlled via hg since the only real 
way is to install hg on all the target machines ... something which is not 
really practical? I do get told to just use rsync to clone the files to other 
machines, which is a little impractical when the target machines are windows or 
don't have internet access. Fortunatly the CVS original is still running and 
back porting is sorting out the distribution problem!

On top of that managing the release process to combine updates from other 
distributed code bases has already created the situation where there are 
'sub-projects' which it is now difficult to integrate back with the original 
main project.

I think we need to start a more integrated discussion on the whole of this 
project management process so that we can come up with a usable approach that 
works more generally for scripted language projects? Add IDE's like Eclipse and 
to some extent Zend framework, and there is another layer of complexity that 
further fragments the overall requirements. I've never had a problem with 
'merging' simply because Eclipse/BC handles that and is currently allowing me to 
untangle the current niggles!

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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