[development] Solving the dev->staging->live problem

[Victor Kane]

> This whole problem would be much simpler if every "thing" had a GUID. Get
> that in place, and building a system to do deployment in the way described
> above actually becomes a realistic proposition. As Sam implied I've been
> conceptualizing a solution based on this premise, but its been hard finding
> time to really work on it. Hopefully soon.

Just a quick point on this: if every "thing" had a GUID (that is, a
globally unique identifier (PHP's uniqid is sufficient if it the
prefix parameter is invoked in order to identify the host machine's
MAC, mayble butressed with an addional field based on an aleatory
number, since otherwise duplicate timestamp based id's will be
created), AND if every "thing" were serializable / unserializable (and
here we mustn't forget certain encoding problems). Serializable: take
an in memory object and turn it into a text object that can be stored
in a file, version controlled, deployed via unserialization, etc.).
Then you would have a realistic proposition.

Certainly achievable for nodes, perhaps lots of other stuff, but I
don't know if every "thing" in Drupal required for deployment, site
merging, etc.

Just wanted to extende thoughts in that direction.