Archive for category CMCrossroads
Common Interface
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, PERL, SCM Tool on January 31, 2010
After much deliberation and soul searching I’ve finally decided it’s time to address one of my all time bugbears. I am going to develop a set of transferable libraries for analysing and operating a CMS. And because I am most familiar with Perl (and, as explained in my earlier post Glue Software, I find it [...]
Glue Software
Posted by Mark in Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips, CMCrossroads, Glue Software, PERL on January 25, 2010
As someone who inevitably becomes involved in the technical implementation of configuration management systems (CMS) I am often called upon to create what I choose to call ‘glue software’. Glue software is not a full integration between two products (often there is simply no way to fully integrate products) but rather it is a more [...]
Holographic Configuration Management
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Configuration Management, Plain Old Blog on January 14, 2010
The advent of the ‘cloud’ and the idea of massively distributed systems (think grid computing and SaaS) is the latest technology swing with the potential to impact configuration management practice. I say ‘potential’ because a properly designed and implemented configuration management system will be able to copy without too much difficulty. The main impact will be [...]
The virtue of indolence
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog on January 12, 2010
It has long appeared to me that people see virtue in making work. I see virtue in laziness. Or rather, I see virtue in eliminating work. As a freelancers I see part if my role on an contract as eliminating as much of the purpose for my presence as possible. This means optimizing away my [...]
Subversion’s Ignore List
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Subversion, Tools 'n' Tips on January 8, 2010
The idea behind the Subversion ignore list is very simple: when adding (using svn add or svn import) files into a Subversion repository, any file that matches a pattern on the ignore list is skipped. The ignore list is constructed from two sources: the client specific global-ignores list; any svn:ignore property associated with the directory [...]
Labels versus Baselines
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog on January 7, 2010
A common question from new Configuration Managers is, “What is the difference between a label and a baseline”. A label is exactly what it sounds like, a name assigned to one or more things (whatever they are). Generally no further qualification is needed. A baseline, in configuration management circles, has much more significance. A baseline [...]
Stubbing in build processes
Posted by Mark in Build Management, CMCrossroads, Configuration Management, ITSLM, Plain Old Blog on January 5, 2010
When developing systems of any size the development team inevitably encounters the following problem. The developers of one sub-system need access to functionality to be provided by another, but the second sub-system is not in a position to provide the functionality and probably will not be for some time. When this happens it is common [...]
Stabilizing builds
Posted by Mark in Build Management, CMCrossroads, ITSLM, Plain Old Blog on January 4, 2010
One challenge facing build managers is how to control the environment in which builds are performed. How to ensure that each repeated build uses the same sources, the same libraries, the same compilers, and so on. Only by ensuring all these elements can we truly claim to be able to reproduce a build reliably and [...]
Creating Tags in Subversion
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Subversion, Tools 'n' Tips on December 4, 2009
Subversion does not support labels as many version control tools do. Instead Subversion uses the svn copy command to create ‘tags’. By convention a Subversion repository is often divided into three sub-directories; trunk, where the main development is often (though not necessarily) done; branches, where (unsurprisingly) we maintain branches that may be used for any [...]
Differentiating Configuration Items from Components
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Configuration Management, Plain Old Blog, Software Configuration Management on November 17, 2009
Configuration management literature is replete with references to something called a ‘configuration item’ and most attempt to explain what a configuration item is. Despite this there remains confusion. “Should all files in my software system be a configuration item?” is a common enough question to raise concern that the concept of configuration item is not [...]
