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

[Adrian Rossouw]

On 10 Aug 2008, at 4:41 PM, Sam Boyer wrote:
> Sorry, I'm not grokking this idea. What's the use case for  
> generating modules
> and associated update hooks?
checking them into your own revisioning system with your own release  
and qa structures,
distributing configurations and more.

Basically keeping your releases in line with each other, so you don't  
have the code, and then a floating
database synch process which doesn't match up directly to your code,  
so you wouldn't have sites trying
to communicate with each other using different versions of modules  
(which might cause incompatibilities).

This way, you upgrade all the sites and the code the way you normally  
would :
svn update; run update.php.

Being able to take any site and going 'You are an install profile  
now', AND keeping that
install profile in synch across later versions without having to have  
to subscribe all the sites
using the install profile to the main synch. (many of those sites  
might not even be yours)

Basically, the dump to module thing takes the long view. Once you have  
done your development,
and you actually want to deploy it in one or more places, you have a  
single atomic package
of everything you need to get the site up and running, to which people  
can add their own content.