[Yanel-dev] Moving configuration files, css, xslt, etc. from SVN into testing and production

[Cedric Staub]

Hello there!

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 11:05:54PM +0100, Michael Wechner wrote:
> Another way might be to have a registry of such files, which then could 
> be used to update these files automatically.

It makes sense to have clear guidelines/procedures for moving data from
one instance to another, but I'm not sure this should be part of Yanel.
In my opinion it makes more sense for people to decide for themselves
how to handle this problem and integrate it into their workflow. 

Personally, I'm a big fan of distributed version control systems like
Mercurial. All you'd have to do is to setup a Mercurial repository with
three branches - devel, staging, production. Mercurial then allows you
to push/pull/merge commits between the three branches.

For example, say you are currently developing a new resource for a
customer on top of the devel branch. Once done, you would simply "pull"
a given commit or a specific set of changes into the staging and later
the production branch, leaving everything else untouched.

In my opinion that is a very neat solution to this problem :-). And on
top of everthing, it makes everything version-controlled, so you can
rollback to an older version in practically no time if anything goes
wrong. Of course Subversion let's you do that too, but Subversion
doesn't have branches, Subversion is centralized and not distributed,
Subversion doesn't let you pull/push commits from repositories, etc.

And even if you're currently using Subversion for development, you can
just create a separate Mercurial repository for your content. Or you can
create a Mercurial/SVN hybrid repository. You can even use Mercurial as
a frontend for Subversion repositories! [1]

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/WorkingWithSubversion

Well I hope this email doesn't sound too much like an advertisement ;-).
Just to be clear, other distributed version control systems like Git or
Darcs also solve all of these problems. I just happen to like Mercurial.

Cheers :-)
Cedric