PowerAda Choosing a CM System

Chapter 5

• Notice
• Chapter 1. Overview
• Chapter 2. Getting Started
• Chapter 3. Basic PowerAda Concepts
• Chapter 4. The PowerAda Development Environment
• Chapter 5. Project Management with PowerAda
• Chapter 6. The PowerAda Debugger: adbg
• Chapter 7. Interface to Other Languages
• Chapter 8. Implementation Details
• Chapter 9. Optimization
• APPENDIX A - Glossary
• APPENDIX B - Support Packages
• APPENDIX C - Implementation Characteristics
• APPENDIX D - Demos and Tutorials
• APPENDIX E - Tools Reference
• APPENDIX F - Debugger Command Reference
• Index

Contents |  Installation Guide | Release Notes

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Configuration Management (CM) is a very important aspect of any software project with more than one or two developers. Rather than providing a single source control mechanism, PowerAda provides a flexible mechanism for integrating with nearly any commercial or public-domain CM tool.

The choice of a CM tool is not to be taken lightly, as there are many trade-off's among power, features, complexity, overhead, system requirements, and cost. The installation and maintenance of such tools is also not trivial. For all these reasons, we recommend you contact the vendor of each product directly and use these vendors as a resource when choosing, installing, and maintaining your Configuration Management System.

As of this printing, PowerAda ships with the option to integrate with one of five products:

• CVS: an extension of RCS available under GNU Public License (GPL). The current distribution of this is provided on the PowerAda CD and basic installation is described in the PowerAda 4.1 Installation Guide. Support for CVS is available from Cyclic Software, Inc. (www.cyclic.com).
• CMVC: IBM's full-featured CM system. This is what OC Systems uses internally and is most knowledgeable about, so you may contact info -at- ocsystems.com for information.
• Razor: a lower-overhead system from Tower Concepts (www.tower.com).
• Clearcase: a full-featured CM system from Rational Software (www.rational.com/products/clearcase).
• PCMS: a full-featured CM system from SQL software (www.sql.com).

On Linux, only Razor is currently supported. Contact OC Systems if you require support for another CM system.

Brief descriptions of the operations provided by the powerada CM menu for each of these choices is described in Chapter 4, "CM Menu".

If you choose to manage files directly without the structure (and overhead) of a formal Configuration Management tool, you may choose 'None' when you install PowerAda. This eliminates the CM menu from the powerada GUI.