Reproduce

SCM is about re -producing. How is this different from producing again ?

• Reproducing should be significantly simpler, faster, safer, than producing. Producing is a creative act, it requires, or rather it demonstrates competencies and skills, which should not be needed to reproduce. In particular, something cannot be said to be reproducible if doing it implies following a many-step procedure (cook-book recipe), or may fail in non-trivial ways. Typically reproducing will be the fact of somebody else, somewhere else, later: something that must be delegated to an administrator cannot be said to be reproducible.
• The fact of re-production should be supported (asserted) by the system (a tool). It shouldn't be anyone's responsibility to state that an event was reproduced—this fact should be objective. The issue is always a matter of similitude and of identity, and it is a syntactic (thus tool) issue to decide which bits build up the identity of objects (across caching, copies, replicas, reincarnations, etc.)

-- MarcGirod - 20 Aug 2007