Vault and Promotion Groups

[jdeary]

All,

I am currently evaluating Vault as a replacement for our Source Safe repositories.

Let me outline the challenge I have:

The repository we have now is made up of 150 stored procedure scripts, each representing the back end to a SQL Server Reporting Services Report. So, we don't ever do builds on them as a whole, but deploy changes to production when the need arrised to only the files that have been updated. This in itself is no problem.

The issue I have is that developers will check in scripts prior to them being approved for production. They like to check in thier work-in-progress especially if it the task at hand is a lengthy one so that they maintain version of the files as they go. The problem is that I can't just assume that the most recent version is the version that is in Production.

What is the best practice for tagging the "Production" version of the files? I tryied labels, but they don't exactly work well because labels have to be unique per file. I would have to delete the old label and add the new one. I don't want to include a build or other version number to make the label unique because I want to be able to query the repository to get all production procedures. I think what I need here is something like the Promotion Group concept that PVCS has.

I also tried having a trunk with a Production branch, but this seems awfully cluncky for the type of solution I need.

Any advise would be appreciated, I really want to get off of SS and onto a repository backed by SQL Server.

Regards,

John

[avonwyss]

We are waiting for Sourcegear to implement the shelving. This solves the issue of checking in work-in-progress by developers elegantly without the need to create branches or whatever.

See here: http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/article ... /28/shelve

But what is wrong with labeling with a sequential number or so? In this case, just assume that the last one labeled is in production, and as far as I can tell it doesn't matter when older labels stick around (in fact, they could be useful if you want to diff against a certain production version or whatever).

[Beth]

There is a feature called Label Promotion that will allow you to change the contents or versions of the files that are under the label.

To try it out, create a label on some folder. Then go to Show Labels. Right-click your label and select View. Under a menu is Label Promotion. Go into Label Promotion, and in that window you can add/remove files and can change the version of files that fall under that label.

Shelving would also solve your dilemma once it's released.

[jdeary]

Thanks Beth.

I like the idea of shelving a bit better. As I understand it, the developer can shelve an item in the IDE itself and not have to launch the Vault Client at all.

Labeling as well as Label Promotion will have to be done by someone inside the client. So the developer would have to juggle two tools.

Thanks for the advise, perhaps we will use this in the meantime unless I am missing something?

John

[jdeary]

One last question.

I am trying to think about this in terms that my compliance people will be happy with. Can I secure Vault in the following way:

"Developers" can enter and edit Labels, but would not be allowed to perform Label Promotion
"Release Managers" would be able to perform Label Promotion (signifying what they are building)

[Beth]

We currently don't have that level of granularity on security rights. I do have a feature request for more detailed levels of security though, such as who gets to add or modify labels, who can branch, who can delete, etc. I can add your vote to it.