This is what you get for not using a nice IDE

Three Drofnats developers all use terminals, vi and cvs command line. So there was no easy way to check references or do the simplest refactoring. So they came up with a few dozens of cvs moduels that depends on each other. Jar files are built through these modules and used by each other as library, in a Maven kind of way. Since everything is done manually, it is impossible to check for references or update calls when a method is changed, or even make sure no cyclic dependencies have been introduced.

For example, Module A can have three version a-1.0b1.jar, a-1.1b3.jar, and 1.2b3.jar, and requires a c-2.3b3.jar. Module B can have two versions, b-2.0b3.jar and b-2.3b3.jar, and has to depend on a-1.1b3.jar and c-2.3b3 to build the latest jar file. Module C has one version c-2.3b3 and has to depend on a-1.0b3.jar

Eh...If you have not been confused, I hope you have seen the big problem here. They have done a VERY good job on making sure the building system can handle all these versions, in a Maven like way. But I don't suppose this can be kept up for a long time.

With the introduction of Eclipse (Not my favorite IDE, not even the second most favorite by the way), we have been able to show the problem to them. However, without any automatic tests, we don't dare just upgrade all modules to depend on latest version of any other modules. It seems that we will have to find out the change between each versions, and manually update them for the simple ones. Then for the not-so-simple ones, we'll have to write functional tests first. The database is not decoupled, however, so we are still researching on how to write test without having to have a full-blown server.

To be continued...