Speaker
M. Stoufer
(LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB)
Description
As any software project grows in both its collaborative and mixed codebase nature,
current tools like CVS and Maven start to sag under the pressure of complex
sub-project dependencies and versioning. A developer-wide failure in mastery of these
tools will inevitably lead to an unrecoverable instability of a project. Even keeping
a single software project stable in a large collaborative environment has proved a
difficult venture in which numerous home-spun and commercial tools have yet to fully
succeed.
BFD looks to solve the problems inherent with large scale software projects that
span multiple software mixed-language projects. This is accomplished two-fold. BFD
extends the versioning methodology of CVS or Maven by enforcing a rich data type
format for its version tags. BFD also improves on the naive build ideologies of the
developers IDE by being able to resolve complex dependencies between non-related
projects as well as knowing when incompatible dependencies cannot be resolved. The
concept of the Meta project has also been introduced to allow projects to be grouped
together in a logical manner. Thus allowing varying versions of said projects to be
kept track of by an overarching framework.
Primary author
M. Stoufer
(LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB)
Co-author
S. Patton
(LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB)
