Configuration management

Hi all, I am afraid that I do not know how to put this in a smaller mail, as I believe a bit of historical background and theoretical background is in needed. But maybe I should split this in 2 mails. First the background. You can skip this mail, if you believe you know all this. Before we used git, there was a lot of discussion how to to proper software configuration management for our open source projects. One of the major problems was that a new version of a package was usually a development versions, and might break the build and also other projects. Metacello allowed us to solve this problem. As Dale always has pointed out, not all projects are the same, so there is not one solutions fits all. This was reflected in Metacello, that supported most (if not all) of these strategies. But just as we agreed on using MIT for our licensing the open source projects, in the end there was agreement on how to do make configurations. There were baselines, that described what packages were used and where these packages could be found - no version information was included here, only the dependencies There were concrete versions, that described what versions of packages belonged together - all versions where explicit, also the versions of the projects used.These versions were frozen. We defined symbolic versions, that described on a meta level the versions (releases and stable version) - these versions where aliases to a concrete version, that could change over time, to include bug fixes. By moving our projects to GIT we could use the version management of GIT, and needed less of Metacello. In GIT we have good branch support, something that lacked in Metacallo. Using git means, it is no longer necessary to define versions in Metacello. Each concrete or symbolic version can be indicated by either tag, or a branch. There is one special branch “master” that is implicitly the stable version. This is supported by git tools, i.e. before merging a pull request in a branch, one can build this pull request, verifying that it s indeed a stable version, and when this was in error, it is easy to revert the change, but leaving this change available for further development. For long term support of releases, one can create a branch (preferable recognisable by calling it isomething like masterv2.3 or release2.3), and merge bug fixes into this branch when applicable. Also in GIT it is possible for each user to fork a project at a certain version, allowing everyone to freeze a certain project to a certain version, and still be able to get updates on changes, and giving the option to easily merge this change or bug fix into their fork, or leave this change out. Finally there is a method to refer to a specific version in GitHub by including to the tag/branch name in the url: <git-url>//<projectname>[:<branchname>]/<source-dir>. This branch name is optional, and when left out, it automatically refers to master. Regards, Diego