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

[Yuval Hager]

On Sunday 10 August 2008, Greg Dunlap wrote:
> When I created Deploy I had a set of goals in mind that I felt a solution
> had to meet. I think (hope) that most people will agree that these goals
> represent the ideal of what any staging and deployment system should
> achieve. Some of this will repeat some of what has already been said
> insightfully and thoughtfully above, but I kind of wanted it all put
> together in one place.
>
> [snip]

I've been thinking a lot about this thread. It has developed to be a very 
informative and important discussion. I was not aware of the deploy module, 
and it definitely looks like a very big step in the right direction.

Taking this  a step further I could *not* imagine myself deploy-ing data onto 
a client's live production site, although I happily use 'svn export' on such 
a site for code. Making all sorts of changes to the DB in a bulk is very 
frightening to do on production, and something I will try to avoid as much as 
I can. 

Assuming I am not the only one with this thoughts, I tried to analyze the 
basis of that hesitation. SVN does version management. I trust the tool that 
if I had made a catastrophic change on production, I can always switch back 
to the old version and leave production in a stable state. I can also provide 
a log of changes and create a diff to know what has changed. In order to be 
able to use a deploy style solution on a production server, IMHO, it must 
provide a trackable, version control style of logging and rollbacks. Somebody 
in this thread mentioned another VCS that might be used - maybe this is what 
he meant.. I am not sure.

Have you considered this type of version control handling for deploy? Or maybe 
this is achieved through the serialization that was discussed elsewhere in 
this thread? 

--yuval
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