Archipel Terminology

When reading Archipel documentation, you will encounter terms that you may not be familiar with, or that you may interpret ambiguously.

This page aims at collecting every specific term used in Archipel documentation, and try to come up with a clear and simple definition.

Generic terms

Version control: version control is a mechanism that allows to keep track of the evolution of a set of resources. In our case, version control means keeping track of the evolution of files and directories within a project. Version control is equivalent to revision control.
Configuration management: configuration management is often assimilated to version control. However, configuration management rather means taking into account different variants of a same resources. For instance, a source code may have different content depending on wether the target platform is Linux or Windows.

Delta; a delta is the representation of a change (an evolution) of a resources.
Resource: a resource is the generic terms for things that Archipel can put under version control. Resources are files and directories.
Track: Archipel tries to track changes made to a set of resources, which are referred to the "tracked resources".

A delta is basically composed of two parts:

Delta description which describes the delta (to which project it belongs, what are the parent deltas, etc).
Delta data, which is information (data) that the delta needs to be applied.

A delta has the following lifecycle: