November 12, 2001

Topic Index:

• New TrueCM Release
• TrueCM Patent
• TrueCM Concept: Text and Binary File Handling
• Newsletter Subscriptions

TrueCM Release 1.0 is Official

Release 1.01 incorporates customer suggestions and fixes to the initial 1.0 Release of last month. Since the 0.90 release in May, the following major additions have been added to TrueCM:

• Cross-platform line-ending format support, configurable by workspace. See the article below.
• Key snapshot commands use workspace defaults.
• More command-line functions.
• GUI auto-refreshes on file system change.
• GUI workspace browser context menu includes shell explorer open menu picks.
• Can now explicitly disable user accounts and remove group accounts.
• New file properties dialog for full editing of file properties.
• Numerous usability and consistency improvements.
• Help on all GUI dialog boxes.
• Broadcast discovery configurability for a-typical environments.
• Detailed list of changes.

TrueCM Patent Issued

The United States Patent & Trademark Office issued patent number 6,216,140 on April 10, 2001 for the technology upon which TrueCM's unique versioning model is built. This patent grant illustrates the advanced nature of the technology that TrueCM uses to dramatically simplify project versioning. The initiated can read the text of the patent on the United States Patent & Trademark Office web site.

CM Concept: Text and Binary File Handling

What's the big deal with Text and Binary file handling? For the end user in most circumstances, there is no big deal. The "right" thing just happens. Yet there are significant limitations of the simple approach taken by RCS, CVS and related tools.

GNU RCS/CVS provides a file-by-file setting for text or binary file type which determines how to expand keywords in text files and whether to do binary or text reading and writing of the working file. But two problems arise which this simple model does not address.

First, in a cross-platform environment, the end-of-line character sequence for text files may be different for the CM tool platform than for the development tools platform, resulting in text files being unreadable by the target tools. For example, if you share a file system between windows and unix systems, with RCS tools running on Windows, text files will have an extra CR character at the end of each line when viewed from unix.

The second problem is related. If, during editing, the end-of-line sequence is modified by the editing tool, or if a check in occurs from a platform with an end-of-line sequence different than the checking out platform, an unexpected end-of-line sequence can get checked into the archive. In the example above, if the file checked out from windows were later checked in from unix, the extra CR characters at the end of every line would get checked in!

TrueCM addresses the first problem by providing a workspace configuration parameter to set the end-of-line sequence to use for text files. The default matches the platform from which the workspace is defined. This allows you, for example, to use TrueCM's Windows GUI tools on a unix workspace without introducing windows end-of-line sequences to text files.

The second problem is addressed during check in by recognizing and automatically converting to a canonical form all end-of-line sequences no matter the check in platform. TrueCM supports Windows, Unix and Macintosh end-of-line sequences during check out and check in.

Together, these TrueCM features expand the "no big deal" handling of text files by just doing the right thing in more cases, and provide valuable capability for addressing cross-platform workspaces.

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