After nearly 16 years, I am now saying a long farewell the the Aegis source code management system (http://aegis.sf.net). Aegis was, in its day, years ahead of its time. But now, with Aegis’s author dead, and only a handful of stalwarts promoting and maintaining Aegis, it is time to look for a replacement. After now more than 18 months of using git and github in anger, I think I finally have have an SCM that is up to the job. On the plus side, Github’s enormous developer community, and fork/pull request model means that people are more likely to contribute. Whilst Aegis has something similar, the reality is very few people will bother to download and install Aegis, so you’re left implementing clunky workflows combining multiple SCMs. More than once, the heterogenous repositories lead to code regressions.

The biggest hurdle was how to handle continuous integration, a feature Aegis had from its inception. After a considerable learning curve, I found a solution in terms of TravisCI, which integrates quite nicely with Github. Then I needed something to replace the versioning workflow I had with Aegis. After studying Gitflow, I realised it was pretty close to what I was doing with Aegis, so I have implemented a versioning workflow using a script “makeRelease.sh” that uses the git tag feature to add version numbers, and added a dist target to the Makefile to create clean tarballs of a particular version.

I’m changing things slightly, though. Whereas Aegis branch numbers bear no relation to delta numbers, so branch ecolab.5.32 is actually incremental work on top of ecolab release 5.D29, with my new workflow, branches and deltas will be identical. Release 5.32.1 will be an incremental beta release on ecolab.5.32. Also to indicate that the new system is in place, Aegis’s delta numberings (D in final place) are gone, and versions will be purely numeric.

You can check out the new stuff in the github repositories, https://github.com/highperformancecoder/minsky and https://github.com/highperformancecoder/ecolab.