Automatically triggering merge activity after remote on-site (custom) development?

Question

In our office, the software we create is sent to our client's office along with an engineer and a laptop. They modify the code at the customer site, based on the customer requests, and deploy the exe.

When the engineer returns to the office, the changed/latest code is not updated to the server, thereby causing us all sorts of problems in the source code on the development boxes and laptops.

I tried to use a version control system like svn, but sometimes the engineer forgets to update the latest code to the svn server. Is there an automatic way that when the laptop connects to the domain, the version control system should automatically check for changes and prompt the user to update the code on the server, or automatically update the code to the server.

Answer 1

I think that the key to this is to require the on-site engineers to use a VCS at the customer site, and to make it a condition of their continued employment that the code at the customer site is in fact reloaded into the VCS on return to the office. You could say that the engineers sent on-site need to be trained in their duties, and they should be held accountable for not doing the complete job - the job isn't finished until the paperwork is done (where 'paperwork' in this context includes updating the source repositories with the customer's custom adaptations of the software).

It seems to me that it might be better to use a DVCS such as Git or Mercurial rather than SVN in this context. However, you should be able to work with SVN if the laptop dispatched to the server has a suitable working copy created for the customization work.

That said, the question is "can we make this easier and more nearly automatic". In part, that might depend on your infrastructure - it also might depend on Windows capabilities about which I'm clueless. There might be a way to get a particular program to run when the laptop connects to a new domain. An alternative (Unix-ish) approach would be to use some regularly scheduled job that runs, say, every hour and looks to see whether it is on the home domain and whether there are changes that should be submitted to the main repository.