On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Markus Roberts wrote:
Not quite. "Cargo cult" is doing something that looks like what worked in the past, in the hopes of recreating that past success, and continuing to do so in the face of repeated failure. "Change management" is refraining from changing something that is demonstrably working in the present until and unless the new version can be shown to be demonstrably better by some objective metric. The first is what you get when "ought to" takes precedence over "does" (believing the planes will return, even when they don't); the second is what you get when "does" takes precedence over "ought to" (you can believe that a change ought to work fine, but you don't accept it until it can be shown that it does).
Just to follow up on this a bit - one of the weirdnesses of Puppet development is how degenerate some of our solutions have to be to cover all of the cases. And 'all of the cases' can almost never really be enumerated, because different distros patch different applications in different ways in different releases.
There is definitely an unfortunate amount of 'iterate until it works' sometimes, but that's the nature of trying to work across as many architectures and versions as we do. We'll be building a much better QA system this year, which should hopefully dramatically cut down on this, but it'll never go away entirely.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. --Barry LePatner --------------------------------------------------------------------- Luke Kanies -|- http://reductivelabs.com -|- +1(615)594-8199
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