On 10/21/10 4:23 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: > The original purpose of having a deployment branch was so that we actually > knew what we were running! :) Even with fairly regular deployments from > trunk, we had two big problems: > > 1) "live hacks" -- little tweaks, patches, and one-off hacks in the live > code to work around temporary problems.
> In theory, live hacks are punishable by eternal torture in the bowels of SVN > branching. In practice, they'll happen as long as it's _possible_ to deploy > code that's not in SVN. I feel that this has to be a symptom of some other problem. What sort of things go into "live hacks"? If they are about rapidly reconfiguring, rolling back, or turning off features, I think that's better answered by having an explicit system to do such a thing (see my other post in this thread about Flickr's system). > 2) Temporary breakages on trunk right in the middle of an important quick > fix > > If we don't do those one-off fixes, workarounds, and debugging hacks as live > hacks, the alternative without a deployment branch is to actually do them > *on* trunk. That means that when you want to slap in a one-line tweak to fix > or debug something, you *also* have to deploy the last few days' worth of > trunk changes. Yes, definitely a problem. In the Flickr world, you're never more than a few hours off of trunk anyway; but we're not in that world, so we start to feel the need for a deploy branch. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ) <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
