I agree mostly with what everyone is saying about development machines,
staging (others here call them test) and live servers and we do that for
our other products but our Catalyst app is still under development and
so we don't have staging or live (yet).
I would make further points (see below)
Dave Rolsky wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, John Goulah wrote:
Also, one box per dev is a fine solution, if you ensure everyone is
using
the same modules. But I've seen it happen where some developer is
using a
different module version than prod and that can cause much greater
issues.
Either way I'd recommend maintaining a Makefile.PL + local::lib to
resolve
this. If you build the prod modules from the same Makefile this problem
typically goes away.
Clearly, there are additional administrivia issues to deal with when
you have one box per dev. You mentioned a couple ways to solve this,
and another might be to use packages of some sort.
OTOH, being able to run different versions of modules is also an
advantage since it lets one dev test out some new modules or new
versions of old modules without affecting everyone else, along with
testing database changes, server config changes, etc.
Our team is small and I am the administrator so I don't want to add to
my burden ;)
I'm quite convinced that the only sane environment for getting shit
done is:
* dev is one box per dev, with the best hardware affordable - nowadays
that means at least a dual core machine with 4GB of ram and decent disks.
I actually have my own development box as you suggest and it works fine
but our start-up company cannot afford hardware for every developer. We
have a managed server which replicates mostly the final live
environment. (can you replicate something that does not exist yet?)
* staging is as similar to production as possible, and staging _exists_
Agree totally.
* even better is the ability to make hot copies of the production
environment into VMs for the purposes of testing major upgrades
(database changes, new daemons, etc). The reason to use a VM is to
make the process repeatable.
Not thought of this before in this context but it makes sense.
Shared dev machines made sense about 10 years ago, but any place still
using them is hopelessly backwards (err, like my current employer ;)
Backward or skinflints?
-dave
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