Working with remote code

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Michael Gliwinski wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> In the company I work for we work on some internal software that is nowhere 
> near any releasable/packageable, etc. form, furthermore testing it often 
> requires putting it on some server which has the environment setup, etc.  
> Currently there is a development server which has everything setup and most 
> programmers actually work directly on that via remote shell.
> 
> There is a plan to migrate towards development on own workstations and using 
> some of the fancy GUIs, etc ;)  This however means that testing a change, 
> program, etc. now has to be preceded with some form of deployment/upload and 
> possibly opening a remote shell to run the program.
> 
> What I currently do is I usually keep a copy of the branch I'm working on on 
> the dev server and push to it whenever I want to test some change.  It isn't 
> very handy when you push a change and run only to discover some missing 
> bracket is causing syntax error :D
> 
> For some other software I've written some hackish deployment scripts (with 
> Fabric) and use that, but that usually has the same problem except that I 
> don't have commits for every missing bracket fixed ;)
> 
> I was wondering if anyone else here on the list deals with similar 
> workflows/situations.  If so I'd be really interested to hear how, any specific 
> tools that are helpful, etc.
> 
> BTW, someone here suggested setting up samba on the dev server and keeping the 
> branches there and working on them remotely, has anyone done anything like 
> that?  I remember reading about some problems with that approach but can't 
> remember what it was precisely.
> 
> Appreciate any thoughts on that,
> Regards,
> Michael

I think either method should work fine. If you find it annoying to have
'fix a typo' in your commit logs, you can do "bzr uncommit; bzr commit
- -m "fix I just did"; bzr push --overwrite" to the remote branch.

Given the options, I would probably prefer not to use a samba share.
Stuff like compiling, etc are always much slower on a network share. I
realize you probably don't have that specific bit, but potentially your
editor, or syntax highlighting or whatever would then have to read
network files to find context. Nicer to have it locally, IMO.

John
=:->
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