PowerVCS Concepts

PowerVCS organizes source files in Projects that consist of one or more directories and sub-directories in the mySQL Repository. When you add a file to the Repository it is assigned version 0. As changes are made and checked in to the Repository, the version is incremented by integer values. At any point in time a Project may consist of files of many different versions. If you want to save the state of a Project at a given point in time you assign it a Label, for example “Release 1.0 Beta”. You can retrieve a Project based on the label to reproduce the Project at the moment the label was assigned.

PowerVCS uses a lock-modify-unlock model where files checked out to one user may not be checked out to another, until the first has completed modifications. A file which is checked out may be “released” to give up the lock without applying any changes. In this case the file reverts to its pre-checked out state. If a file is checked is found to be unchanged as the originally checked out file, the lock is removed, but the file reverts to the original version.