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

[Nik Clayton]

Tielman de Villiers 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.
> 
> Good, bad or scary?  (Presuming a trusted and private network, so
> security is not the issue here.)

Scary.  There's still no easy way to rollback production to a previous 
working copy of the code.

I've got a release process that builds OS (Solaris in this case) 
packages, which install in to directories that version numbers in.

Then there's a postinstall script that stops services (like sendmail), 
diddles a bunch of symlinks, and starts the services again.

It means you can have multiple versions installed, with only one of them 
active.  If you want to make a different one active you go and run the 
postinstall script for that version.

To keep this vaguely on topic, it's a royal pain trying to support 
multiple versions of Perl modules with this.  All the ease of use of 
CPAN goes out the window.

N