[ic] Risks of websites served from Subversion or CVS checkouts

[Jon Jensen]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Rick Bragg wrote:

> Another benefit to unison is you can still vi right on the server at 
> will! (great in the field with a client!) then just sync up with unison 
> from anywhere to bring the live site back to the repository!

That is one of the reasons I find using a version control checkout in 
production to be so great. (Especially a decent version control system 
such as Git.) You can do git status, git diff, etc. to see what has 
changed in production, with or without your knowledge, and deal with it. 
You have the whole change history at your fingertips.

Peter wrote:

> Because I've found that CVS updates don't always go smoothly.  You get 
> bad connections, corrupted files, conflicts, I've had times where I've 
> had to delete the entire repository and check it out again anew.  I 
> can't speak for SVN or other systems, though.  I just don't want to have 
> to be dealing with a problem with an update on a live site.

I can understand that, but unless you're having such catastrophic failures 
regularly, I'd say that you have every bit as much a chance, if not more, 
of massive blowout in production using rsync or unison.

I've never seen such a problem, but whether using CVS, Subversion, Git, or 
others, there are ways to see danger ahead and protect yourself against 
it. Especially with a distributed version control system reverting the 
entire tree quickly is quite reasonable, whereas with CVS it could be slow 
and painful.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

Jon


-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com/