Data Structures Used by Populate and Update

The simplicity of AccuRev’s day-to-day usage model stems, in large part, from the fact that you don’t need to worry about the “big picture” of your organization’s development scheme and process. Instead, you only need to concern yourself with:

•	the workspace in which you maintain your private copies of version-controlled files

•	the workspace’s backing stream, a “data switchboard” that organizes the sharing of files’ changes with other members of your development team

The illustration below shows how a workspace and its backing stream typically appear in the AccuRev StreamBrowser:

But a workspace actually consists of two parts:

•	the workspace tree, an ordinary directory tree (“just a bunch of files”)

•	the workspace stream, which contains all of the workspace’s configuration management information

So the picture looks more like this:

The above illustration shows one important difference between a workspace’s two parts: the workspace tree lives in “AccuRev client space”, while the workspace stream lives in “AccuRev Server space”. The following table summarizes all the important differences.

 

Workspace Stream	Workspace Tree
Resides in an AccuRev depot, located on the AccuRev server machine	A standard directory tree, located on your client machine (or in other user-accessible storage)
Managed by the AccuRev Server process	Managed by you, the individual user
Contains all version control and configuration management information for the workspace, such as version-IDs	Contains no version control or configuration management information
Contains no actual files, just version objects that point to files in permanent storage	Contains only files and directories, which you can edit, compile, copy, etc.
Operating system commands and tools never change data here	Operating system commands and tools can change data here

The following sections expand on these differences.