Hi Reed,

How much work do you think there would be to update Marion?
Since you have intimate knowledge of Marion and what is lacking in it, would you
be willing to list the development projects needed to make it more suitable? (or
even become a team leader for such a project if the source for Marion also
becomes available)
I would be willing to commit time and money towards such a project, if it looks
feasible and the community shows an interest in using it.

best regards

Dalton

Reed F. M. wrote:

>
> From: "Reed F. M." <rfm@...>
>
> As the person who was responsible for source
> control and builds at IB until very recently, I'll try to
> shed some light on the situation with source control at IB.
>
> A number of people, including Ann, have suggested that
> either everybody or at least NewCO could continue using
> marion. The problem with this is that even before all
> this happened marion had long been in disrepair, and we had
> reached it's limits in a number of ways. We were in the
> process of switching to Rationals ClearCase. When I left,
> the source was stored in marion and automatically mirrored into
> ClearCase.
>
> ClearCase is an excellent system in many ways, but suffers from:
> 1) high licensing cost
> 2) high administration and configuration overhead
> 3) not well suited to distributed development. (You can have
> multiple sites, but each site needs a skilled clearcase
> admin.)
>
> These aspects make ClearCase pretty much unsuitable as the
> universal code control system for open source IB.
>
> Marion is a decent system, however, it was not maintained
> for a very long time, and lacks some essential features.
> It stores diffs, but does not allow you to reconstruct previous
> versions without >MANUALLY< applying the diffs in order. Diffs
> for different changes are created using different diff programs
> (how's that for a tongue twister ?), and a misconfigured
> developer workstation might cause no diffs at all to be
> stored for a change. Marion also does not
> support >ANY< form of branching or parallel development, so
> branches and code freezes are done by making a backup of the GDB.
> This was a serious drawback before open source, and would
> be much worse if there are all kinds of patch versions and
> even more platforms.
>
> The existing system at IB worked as follows:
> There was one main marion.gdb (known as 'dev')
> The dev marion contains the source for the most recent developments
> on the primary platforms (NT, Solaris and HP-UX, in recent times),
> up until final beta of a particular release. At that point, a copy
> is made (we'll call it v6.0), and any further changes required for
> the release are made to both v6.0 marion and dev marion. Additionally,
> any changes for 6.x or 7.x are made to dev only. After v6.0 is
> released, the v6.0 marion could be used as the basis for a bug fix
> release, and any 6.0 ports to secondary platforms. If 6.0 linux
> was started, it would begin as a copy of v6.0. When finished, the linux specific changes would be merged back into dev, so that the
> next linux port would be easy. As you can see, this becomes
> increasingly complex as there are more releases on more platforms.
>
> Marion also does not support a hierarchy (directory structure) that
> is more than two levels deep.
>
> None of marions problems are insurmountable, and in hindsight,
> it might have been easier to make marion do what we wanted
> rather than switch to ClearCase (which has a tremendous overhead
> for configuration). Marion could be made into a good source control
> system, but it is a LONG way from being comparable with
> things like ClearCase and Perforce.
>
> My feeling is that a solution which mirrors (both ways)
> between marion and CVS (or any two source control systems) is
> not a very good idea. If a suitable CVS configuration for IB
> can be created, then everyone (including the NewCO development
> staff) should use it. Maintaining two source controls systems
> is always more work that maintaining one. If marion is to be used
> at all, it needs someone dedicated to maintaining it, and making
> the changes required for it to work in the new situation.
>
> IB development is not particularly dependent on marion. I had
> complete builds working from clearcase, nightly, in parallel
> to the official builds. The makefiles for the clearcase version
> clean up a lot of cruft from the old system. Since they are 99.9%
> GNU make syntax, they would be a good starting point for open
> source IB. The one really neat thing about marion is being able
> to make SQL or QLI queries on the source and history directly. ;-)
> The ClearCase query language sucks compared to a real RDBMS.
>
> Ann's comments about 'eating our own dogfood' by using
> a IB based source control system are valid. However, this
> is dependant on someone actively maintaining the system.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -reed
>
> Jason Whorton wrote:
> > NOTE: When I say CVS I mean CVS and comparable solutions...
> >
> > Touching on this some gave me an idea about some of the other issues being
> > discussed.
> >
> > Would it be possible for newCo to use three basic levels here?
> >
> > 1) The core engine team could continue using the Marion source control
> > system.
> > 2) The serious developers at large would be setup to operated through the
> > CVS interface.
> > 3) The not so serious could simply use email, word of mouth, etc.
> >
> [...]
>
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