Overview

In order to better support Agile development, we're looking to allow easier Workspace Rebasing.  Currently, when you finish working in a particular task stream, you have to create a new workspace when you start work on another.  The idea behind rebasing is that rather than having, for example :-

and 'rebase' to v1.2 and v1.3 as your workload requires.  Of course we'll always remain flexible to allow you to choose your own way of working.

Initial Steps

Before we can make Rebasing a reality we felt that we needed to address some of the Workspace infrastructure.  From inception, PureCM has always had a workspace database that sits alongside your code and holds the revision, checkout and file information about the workspace.  Since this holds the file data (in compressed and delta-ed form) it grows in size proportional to the size of the files in your workspace.  We've always liked this approach since it makes certain operations easy to implement offline (i.e. no server connection)

The first stage of the rebasing work involves minimising the size of the workspace database (since most of the information is thrown away as you rebase).  We're nearly complete now and the results are encouraging.  Some of our internal workspace databases can be reduced in size from roughly 500MB to 10MB.  Obviously the size of the files in the workspace doesn't change but it's quite a healthy saving nonetheless!  Early performance figures indicate roughly a 25% speedup when creating the workspace as well.  These new workspaces can also be used offline although certain functionality is slightly limited (e.g. you can't always view file differences offline).  You can always create a traditional workspace that holds full offline data if this is a concern.

Looking Forward

The next step is to actually implement the Rebasing support.  The initial plan is to provide the UI/Dialog for this from the PureCM GUI as well as the Command Line client.  We can't currently make this work from within Visual Studio - our SCC Provider doesn't have the ability to add custom commands/toolbars so we'll have to look at a true Developer Studio AddIn for added functionality such as this.  The rebasing functionality itself is scheduled to be shipped as part of our 2009/1 release in early 2009.