Vesta (software configuration management)

Vesta is a software configuration management system developed in the 1990s.

History

Vesta was developed by researchers at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California.[1] The language for Vesta was first published in 1993.[2] Vesta's approach to incremental software building was to give the user a language to describe how to build the software, and let the builder infer dependencies, unlike other systems where the user specifies the dependencies explicitly. A redesign and reimplementation called Vesta-2 was begun around 1998.[3][4] Vesta was released by Compaq after it acquired DEC, under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) in 2001.

Vesta features include:[1]

  • A guarantee of precise build repeatability. Vesta builds are encapsulated in an environment cut off from the normal filesystem. They cannot use any files, settings, or other inputs that aren't under revision control.
  • Completely automatic dependency detection. The Vesta builder records file accesses made during builds, rather than having the user explicitly specify as with the earlier Make tool.
  • A shared build cache. When multiple developers are using the system, they share the same pool of previously completed build work for re-use in future incremental builds. This saves time and resources across development teams.

Vesta is used by Intel for microprocessor development projects. They employ developers who actively work on the maintenance and development of Vesta.

Drawbacks include:

  • Mandatory locking at the package level.
  • Users connect to a special NFS server to access the repository.
  • No mention of build support for Java, Python, etc.
  • No mention of Mac/Windows support.

A short book about Vesta was published several times through 2011.[5][6]

References
  1. Allan Heydon; Roy Levin; Timothy Mann; Yuan Yu (January 22, 2002). "The Vesta Software Configuration Management System" (PDF). SRC Research Report 177. Compaq. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
  2. Christine B. Hanna; Roy Levin (June 14, 1993). "The Vesta Language for Configuration Management" (PDF). SRC Research Report 107. DEC. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
  3. Allan Heydon; Roy Levin; Timothy Mann; Yuan Yu (March 9, 2001). "The Vesta approach to software configuration management" (PDF). SRC Research Report 107. DEC. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
  4. Allan Heydon; Roy Levin; Timothy Mann; Yuan Yu (June 2, 1998). "The Vesta-2 Software Description Language" (PDF). SRC Technical Note 1997-005c. Digital Equipment Corporation. Retrieved November 25, 2013.
  5. Allan Heydon; Roy Levin; Timothy Mann; Yuan Yu (2004). Software Configuration Management Using Vesta. Springer. ISBN 0387002294.
  6. Allan Heydon; Roy Levin; Timothy Mann; Yuan Yu (2011). Software Configuration Management Using Vesta. Springer. ISBN 9781441934727.
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