The limits of VCS (the "no good Perl jobs"/"no good Perl programmers" myth)

[Rafael Garcia-Suarez]

On 09/08/06, Philippe "BooK" Bruhat <philippe.bruhat at free.fr> wrote:
> > How about using "cp" for release management? So you use a VCS for
> > development, but when deploying the code to a staging/production
> > environment, you tar it up, copy it over and and untar in the
> > deployment directory.
>
> I'd make it a Makefile target, so that it's done automatically, and I
> can never mess it up.

And if you go that route, you should cvs/svn export (or equivalent) to
get exactly what you want, and double-check with manifest, and at
least deploy with rsync --delete-after instead of cp in order to
remove old files and have reproducible results. But making packages is
even better, since package managers know how to cope with
configuration files that mustn't be overwritten, with pre-installation
requirements, etc.