Task: Source Control Rollout

According to the skills overview sheets that you returned, the use of a source control system will be a new experience for all of you.  Because source control is an area that trips up even professional software developers, we will need to "rollout" the use of source control in phases.  We will be following a similar process as what is actually used by professional software development teams when a new source control system is being rolled out.

A source control system is a kind of client-server application.  There are several source control systems in existence, and they vary in their capabilities and complexity.  A software package that includes a source control system plus other team management utilities is often referred to as source control management, commonly abbreviated SCM.  The source control system we will be using is called CVS, which stands for Concurrent Versions System.  The term CVS repository refers to the server-side storage system which uses CVS as the underlying source control system.

CVS is by far the most popular source control system for open source projects.  CVS itself is an open source project.  For security and stability reasons, the CVS repository must be served from a Unix platform.  Fortunately, a free CVS hosting service has emerged from the open source movement to support the open source movement -- SourceForge (sourceforge.net).

The BASICS web site and database project will be hosted at SourceForge.  There are several other process management utilities available on the site, such as bug tracking, documentation tracking, etc.  To make effective use of SourceForge and CVS, we need to start a process of learning and training to bring our entire team up to speed on how open source development works.

We will need two people for the following tasks related to source control rollout:

By the time we get going on using SourceForge and CVS, you will also be in position to explore any of the other 20000+ (yes, upwards of twenty thousand) open source projects hosted on SourceForge.