A toolkit for software configuration management

For almost ten years, Make has been a most important tool for development and maintenance of software systems. Its general usefulness and the simple formalism of the Makefile made Make one of the most popular UNIX† tools. However, with the increased upcoming of software production environments, there is a growing awareness for the matter of software configuration management which unveiled a number of shortcomings of Make. Particularly the lack of support for version control and project organization imposed a hard limit on the suitability of Make for more complex development and maintenance applications. Recently, several programs have been developed to tackle some of the problems not sufficiently solved by Make. shape, the system described in this paper, integrates a sophisticated version control system with a significantly improved Make functionality, while retaining full upward compatibility with Makefiles. shape’s procedure of identifying appropriate component versions that together form a meaningful system configuration, may be completely controlled by user-supplied configuration selection rules. Selection rules are placed in the Shapefile, shape’s counterpart to the Makefile. The shape system consists of commands for version control and the shape program itself. It is implemented on top of the Attribute File System (AFS) interface. The AFS is an abstraction from an underlying data storage facility, such as the UNIX filesystem. The AFS allows to attach any number of attributes to document instances (e.g. one particular version) and to retrieve them by specifying a set of desired attributes rather than giving just a (path−) name. This approach gives an application transparent access to all instances of a document without the need to know anything about their representation. So, it is also possible to employ different data storage facilities, as for instance dedicated software engineering databases. The project organization scheme of shape provides support for small (one man), medium, and large projects (multiple programmers/workstation network).