I've been a
VESTA fan for quite some time now.
Ken Schalk
presented
VESTA at
CodeCon 2004. VESTA is a configuration
management system. Unlike CVS, which only gives you revision control, VESTA adds
configuration and build management. It was used by the Digital Alpha microprocessor
group to manage all design related files. VESTA also supports replication of
source repositories. Here's a couple of citations from his presentation:
- Immutable, immortal, versioned storage of all sources and tools
- Precisely repeatable builds
- Incremental builds
- Parallel development
- Consistent builds
- Automatic dependency detection
- Automatic derived file management
- Site-wide caching of all build work
Subversion reached version 1.0 a
couple of days ago. It certainly is an improvement over CVS, but I think Subversion
is to little to late, unless your projects tend to be smaller than 10k lines.
In a production environment
repeatable builds are worth killing for.
Shlomi Fish created a good
comparison
of SCM systems which inlcludes VESTA.
