Institute for Software Research
Palantír - Distributed Awareness in Configuration Management
Student: Anita Sarma and Ryan Y. Yasui
Advisor: André van der Hoek
Current configuration management systems isolate workspaces such that work in one workspace is shielded from parallel changes in other workspaces. This workspace isolation is needed so that changes in one workspace do not interfere with changes by another developer working in parallel. This isolation, however, creates a problem in that developers are not aware of other work-space activities. As a result, developers often end up making conflicting changes that on promotion to a central configuration man-agement repository have to be resolved - a time consuming task. To address this problem we are building Palantír, a novel work-space awareness tool. Palantír raises awareness among developers by providing them with continuous information about concurrent changes and how these changes would affect their work. Palantír thus moves the point at which conflicts are detected earlier, from being only at the moment at which changes are committed to continuously during the making of changes. This allows early detection of potential conflicts and should result in fewer and smaller conflicts.
Comments and questions: Debra A. Brodbeck, ISR Technical Relations Director, brodbeck@uci.edu