VooDoo a tool for orthogonal version management

Abstract

Version control is one of the fundamental tasks of every software configuration management (SCM) tool. The way how a SCM tool organizes all the emerging versions within a software project influences the overall working method of the whole SCM tool. Most existing version control tools follow the idea of SCCS and RCS. They organize the different versions by managing a revision tree for each single document. This organization — we call it the “intermixed organization” — has some major disadvantages that can be avoided by using an “orthogonal organization” as shown by the author. The main difference between the orthogonal and the intermixed version organization is that the orthogonal organization emphasizes the entire project over its individual components. Consequently, the terms variant and revision span over the whole project and are orthogonal to each other. This paper first summarizes the fundamentals of orthogonal version management and then presents the version control tool Voodoo. Voodoo is based on the idea of orthogonal version management and uses a graphical user interface.