Migrating from a customized PVCS solution to Vault

[LeslieM]

We have been using PVCS since the mid 1980's and at one stage even created our own scripts to do things like emulate Repositories and multi-user/sharing and supporting both get and checkout when those concepts were not supported by PVCS back then (that was the Polytron version).

This year we are modernizing and will be using Vault for new development work rather than PVCS.

However, I cannot get my mind around how I can setup Vault so that our many thousands of common graphics files (bmp, jpg, png etc) can be stored and maintained in Vault once only and be accessible to any project that needs a specific graphic when that project gets "pulled" to its working directory.

To give a very simple example, suppose we have two DLL's each displaying a dialog on screen. The first DLL just needs a Cancel button graphic, but the second DLL needs both an Ok and the Cancel button graphic.

Right now the way we envisioned it was that we would place the source code for each DLL in its own repository but somehow inform that repository that a link exists to specific files held elsewhere by Vault, a common area for shared resources.

Can this be done in Vault ? If so how ? If not how are others handling the case of shared/common files for multiple large projects ? We cannot be making duplicates of these files as maintenance would be a nightmare over time.

Thanks.

[Beth]

Do you use Visual Studio or some other IDE?

Are the shared items built locally or third party tools?

One KB article that may help you decide is our best practices for setting up repositories: http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?p=5183.

A good starting point for understanding our source code control view is Eric Sink's Source Control How To: http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html.

[LeslieM]

Thanks for the reply Beth.

We do use Visual studio but not the IDE, "real programmers" use the command line you know

I read the articles and they pretty much told me what I already suspected, sharing across Repositories is not supported which also appears to be the case for Git and Mercurial given the horrific Subtree/repository workarounds they have come up with.

Dare I suggest that SourceGear consider adding link facility which would place your solution above the alternatives - it would not be that hard to implement and would be very powerful. I question why something so common as shared source code and resources is not supported with a modern vcs.

[Beth]

I have a feature request for sharing across repositories that I've added your "vote" to.

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