> Forgive the thought here, but if things are _that_ big of a pain, would it
> make sense to employ a system such CVS or (heaven forbid) M$ Visual Source
> Safe to manage the complexities? If I had an auditor going nuts on my
> operation, I might think about it...

I am sorry to everyone if I seem to be a pain in hammering this, but I have
wasted one **** of a lot of time trying to fix problems that were caused by
uncontrolled overwrites of library files. The ISO9002 bit is that nothing gets
installed onto production machine unless it has been tested, so we can only
download to a trash machine. The problem nowadays is that the end customers are
starting to request internet access on their machines, and we age having to say
no keep that to separate systems because we can not garuantee 24x7 operation
unless we control what is on.

When building in house copies of IBO, FastReport etc., then the version number
is added to the library name as part of ISO9002 procedures, and the version that
a particular end application uses is logged. That way you can just look at the
application directory and check that the correct files are present. ( Some
systems are now 10 years old, and we can go back and make changes when legal
requirements dictate, but we do not have to replace the 286 machines that
Windows 3.1 is running on )

It is just keeping track of the system stuff, and the likes of which version of
Interbase is installed that is the problem. Because of the way we work, when
Borland say 'Use the gds32 from Interbase 5.1' we usually can access that
version, but at that time there were a lot of people who had to scrounge a copy
because it was not available officially.

Off cause the problem will never arrise again <g>

But seriously, if you look at the likes of Netscape, IBObjects, FastReport then
when you look at the download site at least you know exectly where you are
starting. Download a Microsoft update, do you have any idea what is going to be
affected afterwards until you have installed it?

Lets START from an easy model rather than perpetuating a lazy one. I would
prefer that the internal files within the download were also identifyable, but
that I can live with, if I know that I have got back to an older version
identified for a particular installation. We just say - Install Interbase 5.6
and then replace gds32.dll with this copy - and we have a current production
environment.

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services