Put your source code on a “Build Artifact” diet with AccuRev

I was working with a prospect recently and showing them how easy it was to import their source code into AccuRev from their existing version control tool. We were about to load the external files and did a quick check on the disk space for the tree to get a rough estimate on how long it would take. Almost 2 Gigabytes! I looked a bit closer and found that each of the numerous directories we were importing had a “UnicodeDebug” sub-dir.

Now, I’m not a Visual Studio expert, but in this case storing build artifacts in AccuRev is really an unnecessary step. Because AccuRev guarantees total reproducibility of any code configuration, it would be redundant to store those directories and files on the server since they can be recreated at any time. Of course, the developers might want to keep them on their local drives though. It was a simple matter to set a local environment variable, ACCUREV_IGNORE_ELEMS=*UnicodeDebug* After that, even though the code remains on local workspace disk, AccuRev doesn’t “see” them as external (neither from the GUI nor from the command-line) which removes the possibility of accidentally adding them to source control.

There’s a much longer debate that can be had concerning versioning build artifacts in general, but that’s a much wider scope than this post.

Oh, and by the way, the source tree had dropped from 2 GB to 18 MB. Loaded in about 15 seconds!