Vesta is a

software configuration management Software configuration management (SCM), a.k.a. software change and configuration management (SCCM), is the software engineering practice of tracking and controlling changes to a software system; part of the larger cross-disciplinary field of ...

system developed in the 1990s.

History

Vesta was developed by researchers at the

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) Systems Research Center in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

. The

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

for Vesta was first published in 1993. 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. Vesta was released by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

after it acquired DEC, under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL) in 2001. Vesta features include: * 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 Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

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. A short book about Vesta was published several times through 2011.

References

External links

Vesta Configuration Management System home page
on SourceForge *
Vesta old home page
{{programming-software-stub Free version control software