Oracle Forms

Hi there!

Following situation:
We develop now on Forms 10.1.2.0.2, but former we developed in 6i. For some reasons is one part of our application is also in 6i available. This module shares some librarys of the other parts of our application. As only few of our developers are on 6i, these shared librarys are developed in 10g, and then converted back to 6i over converting the librarys to pld format, (then replaced the things which the frmplsqlconv replaced; so rp2rro.run_product to run_product etc.), then with the 6i reports compiler i generate a pll which is now 6i.

As said, this task is used by only few developers, as most of developers will work in 10g; so it's possible that the 10g developers simply forget this task, and I have now old librarys in one part of our application. So I want to create a task for this in our automatic build system, which does this task e.g. every week. Also I have subversion for managing our sources. Reconverting from 10g to 6i isn't the problem; problem is: for subversion this file has changed, so if I perform a commit, the 6i library would be commited to the repository, whereas the library wasn't changed.

So this would cause 2 problems: first, every time I generate back there is some space allocated from the repository for sources which didn't change (also this would create a new revision for absolutely nothing), and the next is, that developers which work on those librarys have to resolve conflicts which doesn't exist...

convert the 10g lib to pld format; then generate a checksum with the pld file which is hold in the repository. If I have to perform a build, I take my 10g lib, perform a convert, generate the checksum and compare it to the checksum held by the repository.
If the checksum has changed, the library has changed and I have to perform the backconvert task for the changed library, and commit it back to the repository (including the new checksum), so this change is noticed also by the 6i developers.

I have to perform a pld conversion, as when running the forms compiler, the pll file has changed just by compiling it (this also causes me some terrible headaches regarding standard usage of subversion for our developers ;-)), and the checksum would be different...

so, the question is:
when does a pld file change? I have run some tests like converting a big pll to pld format, then compile the pll and save it, converting it again and compare it. For librarys this worked well; a pld file before compile and save is the same like after compile and saving it...this did NOT work for .fmb files; the structure of the fmt file changed radically after compiling and saving it...So I am wondering if this was just luck that the pld file didn't change, or if this is really fact, that the forms compiler doesn't affect a pld file if the pll didn't change (note: adding a blank to a procedure would also be noticed as a change, but also adding a blank to a .java file is also a change for subversion)?

regards
Christian