Combining version control with automatic program building
M.E. Gordon · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 1989
In the Unix 1 system, the problem of rebuilding a program of file when one or more source files change is solved separately (by make from the problem of maintaining past versions of the program source files (solved by SCCS or RCS). This paper describes a practical system that combines these functions and shows that by doing so, additional common software development problems can also be solved. These include tracking and recovering a complete set of the source files necessary to build an arbitrary release of a product, support for multiple developers working on products that share source code, and identifying the source file versions that went into any given software build. This system is called the Portable Configuration Management System. Other improvements upon past methods include compression of the source revisions, the ability to handle non-ASCII source files, and the ability to identify revisions of files by timestamp or 32-bit CRC in lieu of to the version number.