Aegis 4.25.D510

Aegis is a transaction-based software configuration management system. It provides a framework within which a team of developers may work on many changes to a program independently, and Aegis coordinates integrating these changes back into the master source of the program, with as little disruption as possible.

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Fresh Meat project link.

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From 4.22 onwards, even numbered branches are production branches, and odd numbered branches are development branches.

This is the development branch web site. Did you want the 4.24 production branch?

Development change sets: completed, in progress

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aegis, n. a protection or defense [L, from Gk aegís the shield of Zeus]

The Two Branch Model

The parallel production and development branch model has come about from requests by several organisational Aegis users. They would like a production branch which only ever had bug fixes on it. They want the bug fixes, but they don't want (are wary of) things like refactoring, deep feature enhancements, etc, until “someone else” has tried them out.

Bug fixes will be done in the development branch, and then “back ported” to the production branch if there is a request for it, preferably after early adopters (that is, development branch users) have been using it for a while. This may be non-trivial in the face of some refactorings.
Build problems will fixed on the production branch, and then automatically “back ported” to the production branch, if the production branch also suffers from them.

The idea is that users and sites who want predictability can have it, and still apply bug fix patches with a high degree of confidence, and have no obligation to add “unverified” new functionality to get them.

Development Branch Activities

The development branch will be used for the first cut of all bug fixes.
The development branch will be used for all refactoring, e.g. turning project from a struct to a true C++ class, ditto change, etc, and turning all the “OO done manually in C” stuff into true C++ class hierarchies.
New functionality will first be added to the development branch. This would not be back ported to the production branch without requests from production branch users, and probably indicates the need for a new release (i.e. finish production branch, merge into development branch, finish development branch, release, start new production branch, start new development branch) rather than a back port.
Any significant “surgery to the innermost functionality of Aegis” will be performed on the development branch. This would include stuff like fixing O(n²) performance issues. Deep surgery also includes some of the deeper refactorings of significant data structures, change as change_ty which is at the heart of everything.

By having the bleeding edge tarball available on the development web site, folks not using aedist --replay will still be able to participate. Caveat emptor, of course.

Reporting Bugs

If you have found a bug in Aegis, please use the SourceForge trackers to submit your bug report.

	Documentation There is extensive documentation available for Aegis, including a User Guide, a Reference Manual, a How To, and much more. The Documentation page also has links to HTML versions of these documents. The Propaganda page also carries comparisons and some other documentation.
	Getting Started There are a number of resources available for you: There is a worked example of the first few change sets of a new project in the User Guide. There are some Template Projects which can be downloaded and unpacked using one of Aegis' distributed development mechanisms, resulting in immediately working projects managed by Aegis. OSS developers will be intersted in the simple GNU auto tools example. If your project uses a simple GNU Auto Tools configuration, this example has instructions to quickly get your project working under Aegis.
	Distributed Development The Geographically Distributed Development chapter of the User Guide describes how to use the aedist(1) command to send and receive change sets. Both of the aepatch(1) and aetar(1) commands may also be used to send and receive change sets. See the Reference Manual for their man(1) pages. The Working in Teams section of the How To describes a number of ways to distribute projects. The Template Projects provide a simple way to get a project started quickly and easily. They are implemented using one of Aegis' distributed development methods. The feed demonstrates how developers can know when remote change sets are available. This particular link is for Aegis itself, but this mechanism is available for your Aegis projects, too, if you choose to turn it on.
	Download The Download page has links to the download files. The BUILDING file in the tarball contains instructions for building Aegis, or you could use the nicely formatted Building section of the Reference Manual. A number of distributions include Aegis, so it may be possible to download a pre-built binary. There are problems using Aegis on Windows NT due to a dissonance in security models between Unix and Windows NT. However, it is possible to build a single user version using Cygwin, see the Windows NT page for more information.
	Getting Help There is an `aegis-users` mailing list, see the Mailing List page for details. The How To may also be of assistance. The User Guide explains the model of software development implemented by Aegis. If you have found a bug, please use the SourceForge trackers to submit your bug report.
	Reference Sites There is a page of Reference Sites for you to browse, including contact information. You may also like to see the list of SourceForge projects using Aegis, which incidentally showcases the Aegis web interface.
	GUI Interfaces There are several projects which are aimed at providing this. Ages is a GNOME-based front end to Aegis. It provides a comfortable way to access the most common used functions available from Aegis. AdvantAegis (download it here) is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to Aegis. AdvantAegis is written in wxPython (python with bindings). There are some Tcl/Tk scripts in the Aegis source distribution. They cover common activities such as creating and managing change sets. See tkaenc(1) and tkaeca(1) in the Reference Manual for more information. The aexver(1) command provides a GUI interface for selecting two versions of a file to be differenced. There is also the Aegis Web Interface for many tasks which mine Aegis' extensive meta-data.