I want to second BillW's suggestion. A few years ago I had a situation
where a vendor had written code for us and given us the source, but
when we needed to build it, he couldn't remember exactly which version
of the toolchain he used (this was VHDL). There was a bug where it
would only function properly when compiled with exactly a certain
toolset - some optimization difference on other versions was breaking
something in the logic. Of course, this meant that something was
structured in a very fragile way and needed to be fixed, but it would
have helped immensely to be able to at least replicate the binary file
from the source to make sure that we were indeed starting with the
correct source. To make matters worse, the toolset downloaded periodic
updates and its exact state could not be captured by a single version
number. You had to also know the version numbers of all the
subcomponents. It would have been so much better if a history of all
of the upgrades which were applied was kept, which could have been
done easily because each update was a self-extracting file which had
to be manually run. These files could have been checked in along with
the source to keep source+binaries+toolset versioned.

Sean


On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 7:51 PM, William "Chops" Westfield
<westfw@mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 4, 2011, at 4:55 AM, Isaac Marino Bavaresco wrote:
>
>> The repository must contain *everything* necessary to build the final
>> product, except the build tools themselves.
>
> That "except the build tools themselves" is a huge hole in your
> philosophy, and a big part of what I was talking about. =A0Our "tools"
> binary directory contains over 4000 items (including things like
> versioned copies of the C compiler for several targets and several
> versions.) (and SCV software sucks at binary files.) =A0God help you if
> your makefile uses some feature that you thought was a standard part
> of some /usr/bin utility that "the community" decides Must Be Changed.
>
> You can get an unpleasant glimpse of some of the issues if you try to
> install open source software of any complexity from the linux
> community on a (theoretically) slightly different unix system like a
> Mac, FreeBSD, or netBSD system...
>
> BillW
>
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