RE: Control tagging of labels Test, QA and Production?

[Jim.Hyslop]

Rhodes, Phillip C. [mailto:address@hidden wrote:
> I am setting up CVS for our development team and wanted to 
> get confirmation on my approach.  I am trying to fit cvs into 
> our existing business processes...
> 
> There are "developer" and there are "qa" roles.
[...]
> Only the QA person can write the "QA"  or "Prod" tag onto a 
> revision of code.  Developers can write a "Test" tag onto any 
> revision of code.  Doing so will get their code into the 
> automated "Test" build process.
Well, CVS doesn't support the notion of "test" tags vs. "QA" tags vs. "Prod"
tags. The State flags might be useful here, though - check out the -s option
for the CVS admin command.

I'm not sure whether CVS supports this level of restrictions. Since the
'state' functionality is part of the CVS admin command, only CVS
administrators can use the command. You might be able to fit this
functionality in, by requiring all requests for applying state changes go
through the CVS admins. This may introduce a bottleneck in your procedures,
though.

> Because I need to limit who can write the tags of "QA" and 
> "Prod", I think I need to setup multiple respositories.  
Multiple repositories may be overkill, but on the other hand they do provide
a very good control over promotion, if managed properly.

> There will be a "Test" repository in which all developers are 
> writers.  There will also be a "QA/Prod" repository in which 
> developers have only write access to. I would do a CVS 
> export/import from the "Test" repository to the "QA/Prod" repository.
> 
> One problem as I see it is how the code will get from QA to 
> production?  If the developer can not write tags in the 
> "QA/Prod" repository, the developer must apply all tags in 
> the Test respository.  How can I, as a "QA" person be assured 
> that the developer is applying tags to code that is in QA.
Hang on - why do developers need write access to the QA/Prod repository? You
said earlier that only QA personnel have the authority to write QA or Prod
tags. The way I understood your setup was that the developer *requests* the
promotion from QA to Production, but it's up to the QA personnel to actually
*promote* the tag. That part would remain the same.

-- 
Jim Hyslop 
Senior Software Designer 
Leitch Technology International Inc. (<http://www.leitch.com/>) 
Columnist, C/C++ Users Journal (<http://www.cuj.com/experts>)