[ale] Strategies for OS code in the Enterprise

[John Wells]

Guys,

In my relatively new management role, I'm doing my best at every turn to
leverage the power of open source software.

I have, however, a problem I've never really faced before.  We're
implementing a issue tracking package (www.issue-tracker.com) and have
installed the latest "stable" release.  While testing it, we've run across
a number of bugs.  We've also installed the latest development version
from CVS which fixes a lot of the bugs, but introduces a lot more.

So, what I'm left with is a "fork" of issue-tracker...our locally
maintained and personally fixed version, and the official tree at
issue-tracker.com.  For the sake of upgrades and to keep the ability of
taking advantage of enhancements, I need to come up with a strategy of
"syncing" the trees upon the next major release.

While I'm guessing this will simply involve me downloading the release and
updating our local cvs repos with the latest code (handling any merges by
hand), the idea isn't necessarily pleasant.  I'm still thinking through
the issue, but would like to hear other input from you guys...ever faced a
similar situation?  Did you come up with an ingeniuous solution?  Is there
a feature of CVS I'm missing that makes this easy?

Thanks for the input!

John