Release Manager Software System
      
    
    
      The following is intended to be a somewhat-complete overview of the
      various elements of the Release Management System and their current
      development and/or maintenance status. This probably isn't complete,
      and it will almost certainly fall behind in being updated. But hopefully
      it's better than nothing.
    
    
      
    
    Overview
    
      The goal of the Release Management System as a project is to
      provide libraries and utilities to supercede the existing tools. The
      replacement tools are to be re-designed from the start, borrowing some
      from the existing code but being primarily re-written. The intent is to
      build on the experiences garnered from the original tools, particularly
      in terms of identifying the areas that require the most processing and
      I/O time, targeting these for optimization.
    
    
      The system as a whole is divided into three sub-projects. These are
      as follows:
      
        
          - Server Components
- 
            ReleaseManager-X.YY.tar.gz ¤1.6
 These are the elements that are deployed to web-hosting machines,
            those machines that have one or more Netscape (or OpenMarket)
            instances. This package includes the deployment software itself
            (a set of three scripts) and an upload tool that utilizes the
            HTTP already provided by the web servers to receive the content
            via CGI-enabled file upload.
- Client Components
- 
            DevelManager-X.YY.tar.gz ¤prerelease
 This sub-project will provide the tools that content developers
            use to manage, maintain and deploy content to the web servers.
            This will include a front-end tool for invoking various CVS
            commands, tool(s) to perform the basic release-related steps
            (populate, stage, etc.) and a wrapper utility for use by CVS to
            perform the critical translations of paths and URLs from 
            development to deployment preparations.
 At present, the main three tools are done, implemented as one
            tool with symbolic links. Additionally, the CVS front-end tool
            is done. However, the CVS wrapper that does path translation on
            HTML and CGI files has not been started.
- Library of Utility Components
- 
            IMS-ReleaseMgr-X.YY.tar.gz ¤1.6
 It became clear early on that there would be a considerable amount
            of shared functionality between not only the scripts within a
            given sub-project, but between the two sub-projects themselves.
            The elements provided by this Perl module are designed to be
            flexible enough to be re-used while still being functional enough
            to solve the specific problem.
Installation Documents
    
      The following installation documents are available in HTML form:
      
    
    Additional Project Documents
    
      In addition to the component overviews, the following documents are
      available in HTML form:
      
      There are also four MicroSoft Word documents and one Visio diagram
      on the "DMOIMS" share under the Windows environment. These are in
      my folder on the drive, which is generally mapped to "N:"
      on most COE environments: \\I49AFILES\DMOIMS, with the
      full path being \\I49AFILES\DMOIMS\Randy R:
      
      
        
          | 
              Building Perl.doc
                A detailed descriptive of the process needed to build Perl and
                the associated modules.
              RelMgrPkgFmt.doc
                An overview of the format of packages sent to the release
                manager. Covers the contents of the tar-archive and the
                special file "weblist".
              RelMgrHooks.doc
                Documentation of the make-functionality built into the
                release manager tools.
              RelMgrInstall.doc
                Step-by-step checklist for setting up a new release manager
                instance on a host. Includes the needed directory structure
                (paths, ownership and permissions) as well as the required
                software installation.
              Rlsmgrd.vsd
                A multi-page diagram in Visio that describes the functionality
                of the release manager daemon process (from the server-side
                tools) in terms of a flow chart.
               |