DUCS—A Fully Automated Code and Documentation Distribution System

The Distributed Updata Control System (DUCS) is a code distribution system developed for the SLD collaboration to distribute code, documentation and news times between remote collaborators and SLAC. The system runs on both VM and VMS systems and is currently running at a total of 18 sites on two different continents, using both BITNET and DECNET connections.Software updates and news items can be submitted from any site where DUCS is installed and are distributed to all other sites. When an update arrives at a remote site it is installed appropriately without any manual intervention. The details of the installation depend on the type of file, but for source code, installation includes compilation and the insertion of the resulting object module into the appropriate library. Whenever an error occurs the error log is returned to the originator of the update.DUCS maintains both development and production code, subdivided into an arbitrary number of sections. A mechanism is provided to move code from the devel...