Emulating VMS search paths under Unix?

[Aki Atoji]

I have been placed in charge of moving our NS32K and TI340x0 cross
development environment on VAX/VMS to networked Sun's.  The main
requirement placed was that I duplicate the VMS environment as much as
possible.  With some work, I have managed to transfer most of the
environment while getting 8 to 10 times improvement in compile/link
cycle (not to mention the improvements in productivity); however, I
have ran into a problem that I am not too certain how it can be
solved.

The setup on VMS depends heavily on file search path.  When a
developer works on a file, he checks out the code from source control,
places it in his own directory along with the makefile, and set up the
VMS search paths so that VMS will find the rest of the sources all on
it's own.  For example:

#example entry in makefile

   test: test.o test1.o test2.o
   test.c: test.h   
   test1.c: test.h
   test2.c: test.h

The developer would check out test.c and work on it.  When he
compiles, since test.h, test1.c and test2.c are not in the current
directory, VMS goes out and fetches these files from predefined
location.  All this is transparent once properly setup, and they have
been running things this way for years.

My question is, could something like this be done under Sun OS?
Apparently, some Sun salesman boasted that this can easily be done
under Sun OS/Unix before I was hired to do this.  I am not a
VMScreature, and I'm more or less a SYSVcreature, so I am not aware of
any such feature in SYSV Unix.  I did RTFM, but there isn't really
any mention of it in Sun OS 4.1.1 docs neither.  The salesman??
Nobody knows what happened to him.

To make matters worse, the reason why the developers don't work in the
source tree is because the librarianperson wants tight control on the
tree.  I do not want the developers to feel that they are losing
control/productivity by moving over to Unix.

Also, alternatively, I'd appreciate any suggestions on source control
and source compilation setup on following configuration.  Settings
things up properly from scratch might be the best idea:

	Source tree with > 20MB source code.
	10 developers working in various parts of source tree.
	40 different targets from the same source code.

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Aki Atoji                                    {ncr-sd,ucsd}!serene!akix!aki
Talaris Systems           {nosc,ucsd,hplabs!hp-sdd}!crash!telesys!akix!aki
                               (only if above fail)          aki at akix.uucp
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