[svk-devel] Help using svk in a staging development environment.

[Brice Figureau]

Hi John,

Thank you for your answers.

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 11:55 -0400, John Peacock wrote:
> Brice Figureau wrote:
> > Does it make sense if we setup a release branch in the SVN repository
> > that is svk locally sync'ed, and then developpers "svk push" to this
> > branch when they want changes to be applied ?
> 
> See SVN::Notify::Mirror (and probably SVN::Notify::Config) for one way to
> scratch this particular itch.  I use it like this:

I'll look into that.

> 1) All development happens on trunk, which is automatically updated to the test
> server on every commit;
> 
> 2) Creating a tag with a preapproved name (RELEASE-YYYYMMDDSEQ) gets
> automatically promoted to production (via switch).

Do you mean the following:
You have a production working copy of your trunk on which you are just
doing:
svn switch path/to/svn/repositories/tags/RELEASE-YYYYMMDDSEQ

to bring it up to date ?
If that's it, it's clever and interesting.

And if I understand how is working your setup, someone is responsible to
add the tag RELEASE-* whenever it is necessary to update the production,
right ?

> I'm not sure how you are planning on having the developers use SVK (local to
> their machine) and still have their changes flow to the test server (either
> automatically or programmatically).  I love SVK, but for this particular
> purpose, I can't see any point in using it.

I think everybody will be responsible to push their changes to the
remote trunk.

> For example, one of our websites is currently undergoing a complete overhaul and
> redesign.  The test server was moved over to the new branch and the developer
> who is working on it works on the branch directly (in SVN); any commit to the
> branch is automatically mirrored to the test server.  The production server is
> still using the production tags, however, so minor changes can be made by
> another web developer to trunk and a new tag cut (which directly updated
> production).  When the redesign is completed, I'll simply merge the branch back
> into trunk and restore the original mapping.

We usually are working on several features at the same time, so local
branch is really a plus for us, hence SVK. 

Each developper is testing on their own machines. But sometimes we need
to build the sites on a test server to show them to oversea's co-workers
(or outside people). I have to think more carefully to this.

I still have to design a complete system, I'll keep the list posted with
my findings.