Re: Best way to manage package versions?

[larryk]

First of all, congratulations on having the foresight to even ask this question. I've worked with many people who didn't realise that team growth can lead to code compatibility problems. So well done!

To answer your question, you need three things:

• change control for your code.
• test cases that verify the functionality of your code.
• a "Continuous Integration" system that checks out the latest code (from change control), runs the test cases and tells the originator of the change (which is also known from change control) that their change broke a test.

That's how you find out asap that a change has broken something.

You say you don't want to use 3rd-party software for this, but I'm really not sure how you can avoid it.

Perl can help you with the test item above - there are many test libraries which enable you to write simple test cases, run them and report the results. Just write `perldoc Test` on the command line for the most basic intro.

For change control you should consider git. git is actually very simple for basic use. You don't need to learn much to get started and if your team is writing commercial code (i.e. it has some value) then you should really be using a change control system anyway. Don't fear it. Take a look at http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Git-Basics

For Continuous Integration (or CI, as we like to call it :), you can try Jenkins from www.jenkins-ci.org - it's also free and quite simple to set up so that it gets your source code from git for every single change that any developer submits into git, runs all the test cases automatically across everyone's components and then emails the person who made the change (and anyone else who is interested) if any of the test cases fails.

You can of course do all this manually instead of using git/Jenkins or other similar tools, but that's going to become a cost to your team. So it's really up to you.

Good luck, and remember that the cost of fixing a bug is proportional to the length of time it takes you to find it.