Ok, this is by no means timely or newsworthy… But all the same I wanted to put some thoughts together about release management using CVS. I had a recent conversation with one of the Application Developers for a customer of mine in Boston, MA. This client had been using some pieces of CVS for some of their website release management. With the recent departure of their BUILD-MEISTER for greener pastures the group was left without a real CVS guru. It never hurts to write about a few of the great features of CVS that are powerful when embraced by developement teams.

CVS is Concurrent as it’s name suggest. OK, so this isn’t really a surprise, but everything about CVS is built around the fact that there are going to be multiple people needing to do work on the contents of the repository.

CVS builds on some great UNIX tools. Diff/merge and the likes are leveraged as part of the CVS system so that you can use some pretty cool packages and viewing mechanisms to resolve conflicts. Because it leverages some of these things, you have some flexibility for extensions. Also, one can use it remotely and over ssh to further enhance the availability and security of the system.

CVS is widely used, so it will be easy to use with other products. Developers/Vendors will likely provide support for CVS if they are building packages that are meant to integrate with a Source Control System. As it pertains to this particular client, the easy integration with Ant for building, jarring, and deploying their applications. I’ve built some rather robust Ant build scripts that can centralize most of a QA/build process. There’s plenty of web/windows/*nix clients for interfacing with a CVS repository which means your not going to get locked into just one vendors particular client/repository.

CVS can help you manage releases. Do development on 2.0 and be able to fix critical bugs in the 1x branch. Then, fold it in using some of the merging capabilities. The CVS tool is immensely useful for the administrator who is aware of branching, merging, and tagging.

Now, if only Oracle Development could be “managed in text files” so I could put it into CVS… 🙂