Re: [alf-dev] RE: ALF Source Code Mangement Vocabulary Meeting+1-303-928

[Mark Phippard <markp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

alf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 05/03/2006 04:49:02 PM:

> My other thought, and I suppose this is obvious, would be that we may 
> need a command that asks the SCM integration, "What do you support?" Or, 

> "How do you work?". From there we can get into interesting things like 
> meta-data.

Remember ALF is not dictating anything.  We are trying to come up with a 
recommended vocabulary.  The assumption is that the WSDL for your SCM tool 
would not expose any services it did not support.  So you just would not 
have them available when building a service flow.  Likewise, the SCM 
vendor is free to expose their own proprietary services in their WSDL and 
those would also be available to you.

> But other things are more basic. If I want a fresh copy of Project X, in 

> our use cases one would:
> 1) Create the workspace
> 2) Matterialize the workspace
> 
> That's fine in a lot of systems, but in CVS creating the workspace (cvs 
> checkout) implicitly populates it as well. Step 2 could be skipped. ALF 
> will need to know that.

Does it?  When you are the user building the service flow, this is 
something you can know.

> A sub use case of diffing a workspace would be to just ask, "are there 
> any changes to this workspace?". Going back to CVS, getting a full 
> revision listing can be an expensive operation. Some versions (and only 
> some) of CVS have a seperate command for "are there changes?" that would 

> save a workflow time if there are not. Right now, integrating tools 
> either ignore this or solve it with a check box. Other tools are in a 
> similar boat. Last time I used Dimensions (feel free to correct me) from 

> the command line it was pretty easy to get a list of the last time each 
> file had changed. So figuring out if anything had changed since some 
> date was easy. But to get the details of those changes was considerably 
> more expensive.

So you are suggesting some use case that indicates if there are any local 
changes?  Seems reasonable.

> I suspect that as we go, we'll hit more situations where some tools have 

> combined two concepts that ALF might otherwise assume are atomic. One 
> option is to have them report their behavior. The other is to make ALF 
> use cases at a larger grain. If instead of:
> 1) Create a workspace
> 2) Materialize a workspace
> 
> We had:
> 1) Create and populate a workspace.
> 2) Update a workspace (re-materialize)
> 
> ALF would need to know much less about the SCMs it was integrating with, 

> but they would be more likely to operate in a sub-optimal way. Both 
> approaches work fine.

I am not sure we need to be concerned about this.  We are just making 
recommendations for tools to follow and in the end a user still has to 
build a service flow that uses these.

Mark



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