[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] [OPEN-ILS-DEV] Documentation question: restoring customizations after upgrade

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 13:51 -0500, Joe Atzberger wrote:
> Dan, 
> 
> 
> This sounds like a good case for a DVCS, allowing you to have your
> changes more in-stream than in-parallel.  Now that they are
> available, have you considered using a either the launchpad or github
> repos as a starting point?  

Not really. It's been working well enough for us, for the limited number
of times we've gone through the complete process (twice, I think), so
it's hard to justify throwing effort into a different direction. We went
with ILS-Contrib from the beginning in the hopes that our work might be
reusable by others who had the same needs that we do, and at the time
that was the only publicized repository (and effectively it still is the
only publicized repo).

Even if we did move to a DVCS, though, I'm not sure it would change how
we handle rolling out our skins. We certainly wouldn't want to duplicate
all of the files for each skin in the DVCS.

> Upsides: lighter weight, less maintenance having to duplicate updates
> in parallel, your changes would live upstream from the your production
> install, and you could easily switch back and forth w/ stock code.  
> 

I dunno about lighter weight or less maintenance. It's not like we're
updating our production site (or even our test server) every day, and
we're only talking about a handful of files.

> Downsides: conversion, possible mirror latency, new tools.  

Well, I'm familiar with bzr, so no downside if we went that route, and
the six-hour or so latency of Launchpad doesn't bother me given how
rarely we do a complete update of our production or test sites.

> I suppose if you aren't doing it though, than probably nobody is yet.
>  But as far as documentation goes, it might be better for us to
> outline the process of maintaining customizations w/ DVCS so as to
> have everything under one paradigm that's a little more portable,
> durable and likely to succeed. 

I definitely agree that this would be valuable, and if somebody (else)
makes it an easy path to follow then I'll be second in line :)