Crosslinks & Symbolic Links
Like most engineering disciplines, software development utilizes standard tools, components and third-party libraries, so that practitioners can take advantage of work already completed and can avoid costly reimplementation. In the best run software development organizations, implementations of common components and third-party libraries are well-known and frequently reused by developers across many projects. Managing component development and reuse is thus an important part of any successful development effort.
AccuRev assists in managing component development and library reuse in several ways, most importantly the Crosslink, Element Link and Symbolic Link features. With AccuRev Crosslinks, users can include files or directory structures from anywhere in the AccuRev Stream hierarchy in their working stream. This enables stable versions of components to be used consistently and safely, eliminating the manual and often error-prone practice of obtaining such components from external (non-version controlled) sources. Similarly, AccuRev Element and Symbolic Links enable users to create virtual elements that point to other elements in the same stream. This allows users to reuse components in a given stream, rather than using the error-prone practice of storing the component in multiple locations.
Key features
- Full support for Crosslinks (read-only) of elements and directories across streams
- Full support for writable Element and Symbolic links
- Easy to manage links with from both AccuRev GUI and command line
- Enables component development that fosters managed code reuse