I’m developing a mobile phone application that targets a lot of mobile devices based on the capabilities they offer. There would be a base feature set which all phones are expected to support and then there would be additional features that would depend on specific set of phones.
How do I manage such a code base in terms of a version control system?
I have experience with CVS and VSS but both don’t quite fit into my needs for this kind of an application. The last thing I would want to do is branch the code for each of these device sets.
Let me make this a bit more clear with the help of an example. Lets say I’m developing a J2ME application using MIDP 2.0. This is the base feature set that I would expect all phones supporting MIDP 2.0 to have. On top of this I would extend this application for specific sets of phones using their SDK’s. For eg. Nokia S40, Nokia S60, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry etc. All these provide additional functionalities which lets you build more on top of your base application and most of the times these would affect your whole code base from UI to core logic.
One way to achieve this is to use a combination of a build system with preprocessor flags and trying to separate the differences enough to not have too many dependencies. This can get quite complicated at times. I am wondering if there is an easier way to handle this using a smart source control system….
I would look at Subversion’s svn:externals.
With svn 1.5 you can use relative references for directories, and svn 1.6 supports file-based externals.
For example a structure like,
Would be easily acheived using svn:externals.
In Subversion, your repository structure is very flexible, here is one way (of many) you could lay that out:
One hint though: Make sure that you use a specific Subversion revision for each external reference, it may not seem important when starting out, but 6 months down the track it will 🙂