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Stop Breaking the Build
Cap'n Grumpy writes "You know the score - you've just finished some coding, do a final cvs update before commiting, and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. Your code now refuses to compile, or xunit starts flashing up red - test failures! One of the other members of your team has checked in something which breaks the build, and they just went out for lunch ... Argh! Did you know there is a solution to this problem? It is a system which makes it impossible for people to check in code which does not compile or test successfully. It allows coders to review others coding efforts code before it goes into the baseline, rather than after. It organises your checkins into logical change sets. It enforces continuous integration. It is linux based, and GPL'd. It's called Aegis."
Allowing multiple developers to edit the same file at the same time is inherently more dangerous than a more conservative approach. Open Source has it's own special needs, but for closed source development you should rarely need to edit the same file unless your team is poorly organized or system poorly designed.
Yeah, it's a troll. Still, I feel like munching on a little troll.
In fact, there are more installed UNIX servers in large scale operations than there are Windows servers (I work for a company that sells hundred-terabyte disk storage systems, to those exact operations, and more than 60% of our non-mainframe-using customers are using Solaris, AIX, and HP/UX, with Windows rolling in at about 35%).
On the whole, Windows is completely unsuited to enterprise-level programs and projects. It has a laughably low limit on the number of attached disk devices, as well as ludicrious limits on how big those disks can be. Sharing disks between clusters of Windows servers is tenuous, at best, and not recommended for high-risk environments.
Unix(es), on the other hand, grew up in the enterprise, and is quite well suited to that environment. Just as an example, I am aware of at least ten multi-national banks that operate only Unix in their transaction processing centers, which is one of the most demanding enterprise solutions available. Only Unix. No Windows in any of their datacenters.
The fact that there may, or may not, be a system like Aegis for Windows is irrelevant to your original message, which explicitly anointed truth to things which are wholly untrue.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Okay, I agree with you that the /. editors were on crack when they made that call. But the idea of "filter before checkin" has been in CVS for a long, long time.
Basically, there's a file in CVSROOT that can call an arbitrary program. If that program succeeds, checkin proceeds. If it doesn't, it doesn't. :-)
I was very surprised to see this article treat such an idea as something new.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
At the risk of being modded Off-Topic, I will also state that RequestTracker (a system that's currently being built by Aegis) is a great tool for tracking software bugs, issue tracking, trouble-ticketing, and general to-do list issues.
It rocks, it's free, and it does virtually everything that you need it to do without complexity!!!