[CentOS] RPM install vs. NFS mount and code versioning

[Les Mikesell]

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.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com