A tool is described that provides for the automatic configuration of systems from a single description. The tool, newfig, uses two simple concepts to provide its functionality: boolean logic for making decisions and file construction for generating the files. Newfig relies heavily on external scripts for anything beyond the construction of files. This simple yet powerful design provides a mecha...

Feature logics, when used in a software configuration management system, can be used to identify and select versions by their respective features, unifies variant and revision handling, helps detecting configuration conflicts and allows dealing with incomplete configuration specifications. In our model, components are tagged with feature terms, describing their features (or nonfeatures) and ide...

Object-oriented Design frameworks are increasingly recognized as better components than objects. In this paper, we briefly explain the framework concept, show a COM implementation, and discuss the accompanying configuration management issues.

This paper identifies fundamental principles and practices essential to the successful performance of a configuration management system. Practices are grouped into four categories that govern the management process, ensure product quality, protect software artifacts, and guide tool use. In addition, the practices are prioritized according to their effect on software products and processes and t...

System administration has often been considered to be a “practice” with no theoretical underpinnings. In this thesis, we begin to define a theory of system administration, based upon two activities of system administrators: configuration management and dependency analysis. We formalize and explore the complexity of these activities, and demonstrate that they are intractable in the general case....

Systems can become misconfigured for a variety of reasons such as operator errors or buggy patches. When a misconfiguration is discovered, usually the first order of business is to restore availability, often by undoing the misconfiguration. To simplify this task, we propose the Statistical Analysis for Identifying Configuration Files (SAIC), which analyzes how the contents of a file changes ov...

This paper addresses the visualization of the collaboration history in the development of software items using a simple interactive representation called Revision Tree. The visualization presents detailed information on a single software item with the intention of supporting the awareness of the project managers and developers about the item evolution and the collaboration taking place on its d...

Dynamically composed systems are able to incorporate new components as they execute. Therefore, configurations of these systems are not fully elaborated until at least the time that they are executed, and they are perhaps newer fully elaborated. Such incomplete configurations are termed partially bound configurations. Although partially bound, it is still important to be able to analyse these c...

CERN Recently SCRAM (Software Configuration And Management) has been adopted by the applications area of the LHC computing grid project as baseline configuration management and build support infrastructure tool. SCRAM is a software engineering tool, that supports the configuration management and management processes for software development. It resolves the issues of configuration definition, a...