[DUG] Source Control - Sharing files between projects

[David Brennan]

Hi,

 

I'm interested in hearing how people use their source control. 

 

We currently use Visual SourceSafe (VSS) which it turns out (after some
comparison with other options) is quite nice in terms of core feature set.
However is isn't a true database with atomic commits so there is that
constant risk of database corruption if a network connection dies. We've
been pretty luck so far but we have had one fairly minor scare. It also
lacks strong support for branching and changeset type changes. So I can
certainly see benefits in moving to a more powerful tool. The problem is
that the alternatives all seem to be missing one or more VSS features. For
example I don't like Subversion/CVS because their lack of explicit checkouts
means you can't tell which developers are working on a particular file
(unless you use Subversion locks but then only one developer can edit the
file at once, unlike VSS's multiple checkouts).

 

So the current favourite is probably Perforce. I know several companies on
DUG (most notably Accredo) use and love Perforce. It looks great. Costs a
bit but we can probably handle that. The one feature it appears to be
missing is Shared Files. To explain, VSS allows you to share a file between
multiple folders. We have maybe a dozen Delphi projects and most of our
source files are used by more than one project. That's fine, we put each
project into a different VSS folder and share the files to the projects
which require them. Unfortunately this appears to be a VSS specific ability.

 

So the questions:

 

1. Does anyone know how to reliably achieve similar shared file between
folders functionality in Perforce? 

 

2. Most development companies must have similar shared source files. How do
you structure your projects and source files? (Note: I am talking about
source files used by projects here, not files which are compiled into VCL
packages) 

 

Some thoughts on question 2:

 

One option is to just put all files into a single directory. No need to
share now! However this means that projects could easily end up compiling in
files you don't think they are (or should be) using because Delphi will
always find the file. With our current separate folders scheme there is some
control and you can be fairly sure whether a project is or is not using a
source file.

 

Another option would be to put the projects in one directory, the source
files in one or more other directories, and then get the projects to
reference each source file by relative path. This way each project will only
be able to compile in files which are specifically referenced in the project
file so you can easily check which files are being used. The downside of
this (and the previous option too) is that each project is directly sharing
the files with the others. So if you are making multiple changes in one
project over the period of a week or so then it quite probable that none of
your other projects will compile until you are finished because they will be
trying to compile in your changed files. This is particularly frustrating if
you need to make a small unrelated change to another project midway through
the week. 

 

So. what's a developer to do!? 

 

Cheers,

David.

 

 

 

 

 

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