On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 22:30, Alfred von Campe wrote:
Now I understand the benefits of RPMs, but when it comes to supporting tool vendors, dealing with tar based installations and using automounts really simplifies things. I am thinking about installing the RPM based tools on one system, and then copying the entire install tree to a NAS and automount it. I know this is not ideal, but I can't think of a better solution. Any thoughts from the members of this list? Have you tried to solve similar problems in the past? If so, how did you do it?
One group of developers here tries to check everything that might be version-related into CVS with everything tagged at release points. That means anyone can start with a fairly bare machine and a build script can check out all the tool and source versions needed to re-create anything they have ever done. A side effect of this is that the developers never have to build the deployed executables - they just give the tags or a build script to the operators who build and install the final versions, ensuring that the build can be repeated. A different group always uses the same build machine and has had an assortment of problems like forgotten tweaks being lost during upgrades or when restoring after disk failures. Due to the nature of their product they rarely have to work with old revisions and it's probably a good thing. If there is another incarnation of the 'dedicated build machine' concept, I'd probably do it as a virtual machine under VMware and archive copies of the things before any changes to the tool set so it would be possible to revive exact copies of old versions.