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-
- Version Control
-
-
- created: 97-03-03 11.44.50
- last update: 08/08/2000 {15:09:57 PM}
-
- Author: Vince Darley
- E-mail: <vince@santafe.edu>
- mail: 317 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
- www: <http://www.santafe.edu/~vince/>
-
-
- Introduction
-
- The core AlphaTcl library now incorporates the rudiments of a general
- version control package. The goal of this is to allow you to open,
- check out, check in, diff, merge,... files within Alpha. The version
- control support is designed to allow you to use many different version
- control packages (cvs, voodoo, perforce, etc) at the same time (a
- particular version control package is associated with a given set of
- files, so any one file must of course only be under one kind of version
- control).
-
- In Alpha 8 or Alphatk, each window has a version control popup-menu,
- towards the top right corner, above the marks menu. In Alpha 7 you
- have to activate the 'Version Control Menu' package which gives you
- a menu in the main menubar from which to access these functions.
-
- Packages are provided to plug in to the general vc system. Currently
- four such packages are available: vcPerforce, vcCvs, vcVoodoo and
- vcLocal. This last package is basically a means to keep two file
- trees, a 'repository' and a working-tree. Files are edited in the
- working tree, and checked in/out of the repository tree.
-
- VC setup
-
- The VC code needs to know what version control system to use for
- a given file. The way you do this in Alpha is via filesets. Each
- fileset you define can have various additional pieces of information
- attached to it. One of these, provided you have activated the 'Vcs'
- feature, is the version control system. After activating the Vcs
- feature, simply go to the 'Edit Filesets' dialog and you will notice
- that each fileset has an associated popup menu from which you can
- select Cvs, Perforce, Voodoo etc.
-
- If you don't already have a fileset which includes the files you want
- to use a version control system on, you need to create one. If you'd
- like the files to be in the Fileset Menu, you probably should use a
- 'From Hierarchy' or 'From Directory' fileset. If you'd simply like
- Alpha to know about the fileset ('behind the scenes', as it were),
- then a 'Recurse In' fileset is probably best. See "Filesets Help" for
- more information.
-
- Once you have a fileset associated with a given file, Alpha
- automatically places relevant version control actions in the popup
- menu in each window (for Alpha 7.x, this popup does not exist. In
- this case you have to use the less sophisticated global Version
- Control Menu).
-
- VC operations
-
- Currently you may carry out any of the following operations:
-
- add
- checkIn
- undoCheckout
- makeWritable
- checkOut
- refetchReadOnly
- fetchReadOnly
- showDifferences
-
- Although some may not be 100% implemented yet.
-
- to be continued...
-
- VC limitations
-
- Most of the current plug-ins cannot be used to setup a particular
- version control system; they rely on a pre-existing configuration
- (for the vc server, password, etc). Hence you will probably have to
- use a cvs client, perforce client etc to configure the system before
- Alpha will be able to use it effectively.
-