3.1. Current and Future Development of Elego ComPact

Here is a list of tasks that have been proposed to further improve and develop Elego ComPact. Some of these items are still under consideration (e.g. rewrite of CVS server), while others are already being worked on (e.g. added Java configurations).

If you want to know about the status of a certain feature or would like a special facility or option to be added to the ComPact software, feel free to contact us at info@elego.de (for informal suggestions and requests) or bugs@elego.de (for more formal change requests and bug reports).

1. Extended Repository Services The ComPact resource service should be extended by access functions for CVS repository data, like file lookup, package/project/collection search, search for `broken' labels etc. This could be done in two stages:

   1. Implement functions that only rely on the existing repository structures.

   2. Implement functions that handle meta-information that is provided by the ComPact package and project managers. This meta information may first be stored in simple text files, and later migrated to an SQL database accessed via ODBC.

   
   
   

2. Add Java configurations The current release of ComPact misses some simple, easy-to-use, flat Java configurations, that integrate more easily with existing Java development environments.

   Added configurations should be tested on Linux and Windows for JDK, JBuilder, and VisualCafe.

3. User-defined CBCL functions The backend configuration language CBCL of ComPact should be extended to allow user programmable recursive functions. Of course appropriate simple functions and test predicates need to be added too to make this a usable feature.

4. Improved integration of GNATS and Request Tracker The freely available problem management and request tracking tools should be more tightly integrated with Elego ComPact; several standard setups should be provided.

5. Rewrite of CVS server The complete CVS server should be rewritten in Modula-3. Most of the needed functionality has already been implemented by John Polstra in his CVSup application. Network objects should be used as the underlying communication mechanism, and the handling of tags should be completely separated from RCS files. It would also be nice if directories could be handled as first class objects, and the server would offer several more information access functions (what files, directories, packages, collections, projects, configurations etc.).

   For all these things probably an underlying database with ODBC access would be a nice solution.

   This could also be the base for an integrated ComPact problem management and change control system.

   I think that we could make the repository service at least 10 times faster than it is currently.

6. Completely integrated Problem Management and Request Tracking Elego ComPact should provide its own integrated facilities for problem report management and request tracking. The functionality should be implemented using the already mentioned SQL-DB-based repository services.

7. Integrated Release Planning and Task Tracking Facilities (Complete Change Control) As a long term goal, Elego ComPact should provide the complete set of possible change control tasks and activities, including release planning, task and activity management, management report services.