We are just starting to use EA and is having a little bit of a problem to figure out how to best set up version control.
We have a number of people that need to perform modeling (within the same model!) at the same time.
Right now we have created a shared project were each model as well as the packages below each model are all separate configuration management items (each of them are exported/inported from the CM-system when you check-in / check-out).
This works fine until you like to create "common repository packages" for actors or commonly used classes etc. Since relationships seem to be stored together with the object from were the "arrow orginates" we all the time have to check out the actor package when we add an actor to a new interaction diagram (since we need to add a new arrow from the actor to another element of some kind) and this is problematic since only ONE person can have it checked out at a time
How are other users handling this kind of problems?
One could in theory decide to not version manage this kind of frequently shared repositories but as soon as not the whole model is version controled I think one largly looses the point with using version control at all.. Also EA with only a data base as storage for the work seem risky in a multiuser environment - anybody can by misstake for instance remove important work and restoring an old backup version of the database is rarly an alternative since all work after the restore date/time would be lost...
The prefered solution (as I see it) would be if multiple users could check-out the same package and EA contained an auto-merge function that could handle any conflicting edits.
One could also consider to be able to do version control on a finer granularity than packages (single object or diagram?) and allow a mode were each change automatically check-in & check-out from the CM-system this way keeping the lock time short)...
All sugestions about how to handle the problem today (as well as thought about future improvements for the EA team) are appreciated!
We are right now using version 6.5 but are in the process to migrate to 7.1 and we use Perforce as CM system.
