Basic Tools Usage
Overview
This is just a *very* simple summary of what each of the few main tools do, the handful that you need to know in order to use vesta. You don't need to understand vesta to use it, so this skips a lot of detail that might be useful to you in the long-run, aiming instead for keeping things simple.
It has more info than the tools index page on vestasys.org, but a lot less than even the first paragraphs of most of the manpages.
- vcheckout
- as per classic "checkout" and "co" from most SCM's, this puts a whole package into your working directory where you can edit it, update it and add to it, whilst simultaneously locking the repository so that no-one else can try editing that same package until you're finished
- vcheckin
- as per classic "checkin" and "ci" from most SCM's, this only works if you have already checked-out a package; if you have, it puts your modified version into the repository under a new version number (typically one higher than the number of the version you'd originally checked-out)
- vmake
- run this in a package's directory to build that package
- ...with "-shipto /target/directory" to cause the output files (compiled binaries etc) to be written to directory "/target/directory"
- superficially similar to GNU (etc) "make"
- automatically parallelizes across multiple machines in your network, getting each machine to do part of the compilation / building, and uses an advanced caching system to re-use the results of old builds without ever returning a broken build
- run this in a package's directory to build that package
- vadvance
- has to be done to recently-changed-source before you can build it