PVCS Version Manager (originally named Polytron Version Control System) is a software package by

Serena Software With operations in 11 countries, Serena Software Inc. is an American software company that provides IT management products to enterprises. Serena solutions offer a process orchestration approach and span the areas of development, DevOps and IT m ...

Inc., for

version control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

files. PVCS follows the "locking" approach to concurrency control; it has no ''

merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the comb ...

'' operator built-in (but does, nonetheless, have a separate merge command). However PVCS can also be configured to support several users simultaneously attempting to edit the file; in this case the second chronological committer will have a branch created for them so that both modifications, instead of conflicting, will appear as parallel histories for the same file. This is unlike

Concurrent Versions System Concurrent Versions System (CVS, also known as the Concurrent Versioning System) is a revision control system originally developed by Dick Grune in July 1986. CVS operates as a front end to RCS, an earlier system which operates on single fil ...

(CVS) and

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and social norms. Sub ...

where the second committer needs to first ''merge'' the changes via the ''update'' command and then resolve conflicts (when they exist) before actually committing. Originally developed by Don Kinzer and published by Polytron in 1985, through a history of acquisitions and mergers, the product was at times owned by Sage Software of Rockville (1989), Maryland (unrelated to

Sage Software The Sage Group plc, commonly known as Sage, is a British multinational enterprise software company based in North Tyneside, England. As of 2017, it is the UK's second largest technology company, the world's third-largest supplier of enterpri ...

of the UK), Intersolv 1992,

Micro Focus International Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

1998 and

Merant PLC Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

2001. The latter was acquired by Serena Software in 2004, which was then acquired by

Silver Lake Partners Silver Lake is an American global private equity firm focused on investments in technology, technology-enabled and related industries. Founded in 1999, the firm is one of the largest technology investors in the world. Its investment holdings have ...

in 2006. Synergex ported both the PVCS Version Manager and the PVCS Configuration Builder (an extended make utility, including a variant of the command line tool make) to various

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

platforms and

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

. In 2009, Serena Software clarified that it will continue to invest in PVCS and provide support to PVCS customers for the foreseeable future.
PVCS Version Manager 8.5 release (2014) introduces both new feature and new platform support. In 2016,

announced the acquisition of Serena Software to again become the custodians of PVCS.

References

External links

* Version control systems {{Programming-software-stub

See also

References

External links