DSEE: a software configuration management tool

Hewlett-Packard Journal, June, 1991 by David c. Lubkin

If an executable is compiled with an arbitrary collection of stdio.hs, it might take weeks to track down a problem caused by inconsistency in the include file. DSEE ensures that all builds use the same set of tools and system include files by building relative to a reference directory.

Heterogeneous Configuration Management

Many users want to use DSEE to develop software for non-Apollo platforms. To fill this need we generalized configuration management to handle heterogeneous configuration management. Version 4 of DSEE supports other systems that are based on the UNIX* operating system. Fig. 7 shows the setup for heterogeneous configuration management.

DSEE can be used to develop software for non-UNIX targets as well; it's just more involved. Since a translate rule is an arbitrary shell script, it can copy sources over to a non-UNIX target, invoke a shell, and copy the results back into a pool.

Host Types. To handle heterogeneous configuration management, each system model component has a host type, which is a user-defined text string that describes the class of machine the translation should run on. It reflects the distinctions between machines that the user wants to use. Host types can be used to make very fine distinctions, like DN4500 with FPA board, or broad groupings like UNX. The UNIX keyword might be used for translators that produce portable output, like yacc or troff. The only host types that is predefined is apollo. The following is an example of a user-defined host table.

# /sys/dsee/dsee--config/hosts
#
# host--type             OS manager        build manager
#
  apollo                 domain--os        dds
  prism                  domain--os        dds
  dn4500--w--fpa         domain--os        dds
  hp-ux                  posix             rsh
  sun 3861               posix             rsh
  unix                   posix             rsh

Each host type has an associated OS manager, which is used to manage derived objects and translate pathnames, and a build manager, which is used to select build computers and start compilations. DSEE V4 provides OS managers for Domain/OS and POSIX, and build managers for Domain network services (dds) and rsh (remote shell). Each host type also has an associated list of build computers. DSEE picks one, and then starts the build on the foreign machine. If additional builds are required, they can proceed in parallel.

Split Pools. The bound configuration thread and derived object sections of a pool can optionally be split into separate directories. For non-Apollo users, this means that users can use their existing investment in non-Apollo disks to store binaries. Depending on the user's network configuration, this can also result in faster load (/bin/ld) times. When there are DSEE managers for non-UNIX operating systems, split pools may be essential, since many have file system attributes that have no equivalent on Domain/OS.

User interface

Version 4 also comes with a new user interface (see Fig. 8). It is based on the X Window System, and conforms to OSF/Motif standards. [2] As such, it can be used remotely from any machine that supports X. The user interface is object-oriented. Objects can be browsed, resulting in icons being copied to a desktop area. DSEE commands can be applied to selected icons through associated menus, picked from a menu bar, or entered from a textual command window. When DSEE needs more information, it pops up a dialog box. The boxes are preseeded with likely option values. Some of these dialog boxes support multiple iteration, which allows the same command to be issued repeatedly, each time using a different list of arguments (Fig. 9). All commands result in entries in a command history, from which they can be perused and reissued.