Re: Vendor drop management

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Rupinder Singh Mazara wrote:

> yes, the open_source project is being developed under subversion as
> is our "my_custom" project
>
> > are your vendor releases already under subversion control? that
> > would make the process much simpler.

ok, as i read it, what you'd do to support a vendor branch (and others
can correct me if i screw up), first, start with your own local copy
of, say, the software, call it "ack 1.0". as long as ack is available
via subversion, you know you can always go back and get it.

start hacking your local copy, make any changes you want.

eventually, ack 1.1 becomes available, and is also available via
subversion. what you want to do is "svn merge", and what you'd merge
are the diffs between the vendor's releases 1.0 and 1.1. in effect,
you're merging the vendor's changes into your working copy.

this might involve having to resolve some merge conflicts, who knows?
but once that's done, you now have your changes, plus the vendor's
upgrades as well. get back to work. wait for ack 1.2. repeat.

rday

p.s. philosophical note here. as much as possible, i try to avoid
having to hack vendor releases since that generally voids the
warranty and makes maintenance more difficult. a couple choices:

first, see if you can just add a wrapper of some kind around the
official release. that way, you can still bug the vendor for support.

otherwise, if you have legitimately useful extensions, push them
upstream to the vendor and see if they'll add them there, if you don't
mind sharing them with the rest of the world.

thoughts?

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Received on Wed Aug 24 15:09:44 2005