An Overview of Repository Technology

摘要

A repository is a shared database of information about engineered artifacts. We define a repository manager to be a database application that supports checkout/checkin, version and configuration management, notification, context management, and workflow control. Since the main value of a repository is in the tools that use it, we discuss technical issues of integrating tools with repositories. We also discuss how to implement a repository manager by layering it on a DBMS, focusing especially on issues of programming interface, performance, distribution, and interoperability.