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Software issue numbers

I've recently started writing simple software projects in C and I'm wondering how I will control issue numbers.

Up until now I've been writing in assembly language for 8bit micro's. I would normally only have one or two files per project so it was easy to rename the files each time a change was required. This meant that I could always revert back to a earlier issue number if required.

This is all becoming more complex with my C language projects. At the very least I need to rename the main *.c file and the *.h and any other include files that might need to change.

Are there standard (simple) ways of handling all this issue control business and if so where do I find information on it. I don't want it to get too complicated and I don't want to re-invent the wheel either. The research I've done so far goes into the software configuration control area and programms but I'm thinking most of this is overkill for the simple stuff we're doing.

Thanks and regards, Dean.

Reply to
dean
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Seriously, once you got some simple revision control in place, it'll make life a lot easier. Look at subversion and TortoiseSVN, for example.

Failing that, rather than rename etc all you need to do to take a 'snapshot' of your source tree is to (g)zip/arc the whole lot and then rename the zip file to something meaningful. If you grab the command-line version of winzip for example you can write a batch file to zip only certain files (source) and do the rename etc automagically.

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266
Reply to
Mark McDougall

Agh! Do people really still work that way?

The standard way to handle this is with a version (or revision) control system. Wikipedia has a good page:

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Get a version control system. Most version control systems that you'll find are big, and can be complicated to set up. This is because when you're managing some huge project the complication setting up the version control system to echo a 30-directory tree is exponentially less than the complication of trying to do revision control on 500 files on floppies.

But version control systems don't have to be big, or complicated. I have Cygwin on my computer, and I use RCS for my client's software. Since none of my code bases are larger than 10 files or two directories RCS fits the bill pretty well. It lets me check files out, check in new revisions, label sets of files to generate a shippable version, go back and forth with versions, do diffs and all that other cool stuff. It _doesn't_ easily let me handle huge projects with multiple directories

-- but I'm not doing that anyway (and if I do, I'll be looking at CVS or Subversion, or whatever is current when I need to cross that bridge).

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Reply to
Tim Wescott

Whether it's simple or not, consider breaking things up functionally into more than just one or two files. You'll find it far easier to maintain.

Re version control: in the absence of a proper version control system, just take a snapshot of the source folders with e.g. Winzip. Give the resulting archive a name that represents the project and the date. Keep the archive a) somewhere safe and b) to hand for reference.

I'm puzzled as why you'd think you need to rename files, but hey...

Steve

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Reply to
Steve at fivetrees

Hello ,

RCS is simple and easy to use.

Best Regards, Vivekanandan M

Reply to
Vivekanandan M

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