Orthogonal version management

Abstract

One part of the “Software Configuration Management” — software version control — is the task of controlling different versions of documents. Most existing version control systems accomplish this task by managing variant and revision trees of single documents. The structure of these trees depends on the chronological evolution of the software project. We call this form of organization “intermixed organization” of variants and revisions. This paper points out the disadvantages of that organization, introduces a new way of version management - the “orthogonal organization” - and then compares the two organizations by means of an example.