Distributed con guration management is intended to support the activities of projects that span multiple sites. NUCM is a testbed that we are developing to help us explore the issues of distributed con guration management. NUCM separates con guration management repositories (i.e., the stores for versions of artifacts) from con guration management policies (i.e., the procedures by which the versions are manipulated) by providing a generic model of a distributed repository and an associated programmatic interface. This paper describes the model and the interface, presents an initial repository distribution mechanism, and sketches how NUCM can be used to implement two, rather di erent, con guration management policies, namely checkin/check-out and change sets.

ions 76 9.1.1.1 Consumer Abstraction 76 9.1.1.2 Software System Abstraction 77 ix 9.1.1.3 Process Abstraction 78 9.1.2 Process Coverage 78 9.1.3 Coordination 79 9.1.4 General Requirements 79 9.2 Mapping the Software Dock to Requirements 82 9.3 Critical Analysis Of Related Technologies 86 9.3.1 Traditional Configuration Management 86 9.3.2 Software System Install, Update, and Remove 87 9.3.3 Software System and Site Description 89 9.3.3.1 The Open Software Description (OSD) Format 89 9.3.3.2 The Software Management Information Format (MIF) 92 9.3.3.3 Other Software System and Site Description Technologies 94 9.3.4 Network Management and System Administration 95 9.3.5 Content Delivery 98 9.3.6 Configurable Distributed Systems 98 9.3.7 Component Models 100 9.4 Usage Experiments 102 9.4.1 Online Learning Academy 102 9.4.1.1 Existing Deployment Solution 103 9.4.1.2 Software Dock Deployment Solution 104 9.4.2 The Chimera Open Hypermedia System 106 9.4.2.1 Existing Deployment Solution 107 9....

Few tools exist to address the post-development activities of configuring, releasing, installing, updating, reconfiguring, and even de-installing a software system. Certainly there isnouniedapproach for all of these activities, and none that can take full advantage of a wide-area network. The Software Dock represents an architecture for supporting post-development activities in such a setting. It is designed asasystemof loosely-coupled, cooperating, distributed components that are bound together by a widearea messaging and event system. The components include eld docks for maintaining site-specific configuration information by consumers, release docks for managing the configuration and release of software systems by producers, and a variety of agents for automating the activities. Its mechanisms of consistent access to a site's configuration information and resources, standardized methods for making software releases available and visible, and a global event system give software producers and consumers new leverage in managing complex software systems. In this paper we describe the Software Dock architecture and discuss the use of a prototype implementation of that architecture in deploying a complex system.

This paper describes the main design principles underlying DVS and NUCM together with the basics issues regarding their implementation. DVS has been used and is currently being used for collaborative authoring involving several authors distributed over five different sites on the Internet. We also discuss this first experience and the feedback and validation for both DVS and NUCM.