A source distribution of eCos consists of a number of packages, such as the kernel, the C library and the µITRON subsystems. These are individually versioned in the tree structure of the source code. This is to support future distribution on a per-package basis and of third party packages whose versioning system might be different. Future tools will help manage building an application from a selection of different versions of different packages.
The presence of the version information in the source tree structure might be a hindrance to the use of a separate source control system such as CVS or SourceSafeTM. To work in this way, you can rename all the version components to some common name thus unifying the structure of source trees from distinct eCos releases. "current" is suggested for this name.
The eCos build system will treat any such name as just another version of the package(s), and support building in exactly the same way. However, performing this rename invalidates any existing build trees which referred to the versioned source tree, so do the rename first, before doing any other work, and do a complete rebuild afterwards.
Note: This chapter should only be relevant to people interested in modifying eCos sources or using their own source control on eCos sources over multiple releases.