Comments on: The AccuRev CLI – Going beyond SCM

By: Getting the Most out of AccuRev’s Windows Explorer Integration « Software Configuration Management

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:08:54 +0000

[...] code control tools they may have to write scripts, manage configurations or interact with a command line interface to be able to get their work done. This type of interaction will likely not work well for these [...]

By: davidpthomas

davidpthomas — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:48:18 +0000

Hi! Great feedback. To clarify, the AccuRev CLI (client) is the defacto API for communicating with the AccuRev server [handling socket & txn mgmt]. Options include XML ($accurev xml) or traditional CLI arguments ($accurev ). The AccuRev GUI actually calls the CLI behind the scenes using XML in & out. Thus, anything you can do in the GUI, you can do in the CLI! AccuRev started out as a Unix-only tool back in the day, and the CLI interface shows its roots.

For those using the XML in/out format, you’ll be glad to know that the XML output for most commands is very flat making it trivial to convert into a hash (of hashes) structure for programmatic interpretation.

Anyone else using ruby?

dave

By: Ryan LaNeve

Ryan LaNeve — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:37:45 +0000

How this is different than “just about any other open source scm tool” would depend entirely on which tool, whether its CLI allowed output to XML and whether or not using the CLI was as intuitive as AccuRev’s. For some systems – open source or otherwise – I’m sure that would be the case. Nothing about this post was intended to suggest that *only* AccuRev provided such functionality. I thought the sentence beginning “While I’m sure it would have been possible to create such a tool using any SCM…” would make that clear.

Whether or not “more flexible” is defined by a powerful CLI and a thin GUI, or a powerful GUI and a thin CLI is a personal preference, though in my opinion the question doesn’t apply here. AccuRev has both a powerful GUI (far more powerful than any open source scm we’ve ever seen) as well as a powerful CLI which exposes all functionality that could have been performed by the GUI.

Wrappers for scripting languages would certainly be nice.

By: Fitz

Fitz — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:40:59 +0000

Sounds good – but really, how is that different than just about any other open source scm tool?

My experience has been that other tools are more flexible with things like a powerful CLI and then a great thin GUI layer (think SVN & Tortoise SVN).
It seems as though accurev goes the other way, which many big tools do, which is put the functionality in the gui, then expose some to the CLI. Which always frustrates the heck out of power-users since inevitably there is something the GUI can do that the CLI can’t. Whereas every operation the Tortoise SVN GUI does, you can do through the command line.

SVN for eaxmple, can return it’s information as XML – but you can also get a library wrapper for just about any scripting language that lets you work at an even tighter integration level than the CLI if you want. Just seems like there is more to the story.

By: Free Webinar on Continuous Integration « Software Configuration Management

Free Webinar on Continuous Integration « Software Configuration Management — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:09:11 +0000

[...] Ryan shows off some great stuff with users checking in code that automatically kicks off a build and even updates the product version number to reflect the latest transaction number from AccuRev. Ryan recently blogged about some of the cool things he’s done using the AccuRev command-line interface (CLI) and its ability to output results formatted as XML: The AccuRev CLI, Going Beyond SCM. [...]