Bazaar

Bug #294709
Comment #26

Comment 26 for bug 294709

Revision history for this message

Peter Liepa (pliepa) wrote on 2009-08-11:

#26

I'm beginning to think that satisfying users like me may be counterproductive for your project.

To recap, I'm helping a small group of volunteers to maintain a ski club website. I'd like to set up version control on server A, and deploy the website content to server B. I don't mind whether A and B are the same or different. My main restriction is that my only access to server B is via FTP. And of course I want the VCS to do the deployment -- it should only update the files that have changed or been added, while deleting those files that have been deleted.

In researching this, I found descriptions of people setting up a VCS on server B, and using the working tree as the actual website content. I.e A and B are the same. That meant that deployment was pretty well automatic .. whenever you committed/pushed a change to the VCS, the working tree was updated, and so the website was automatically updated. But these people were able to use SSH and set up a VCS on their server. So I couldn't do what they were doing.

I was hoping that I could pull off this trick with Bazaar, because it handled FTP updates of the VCS. Yesterday, I tried making this happen on a host server that didn't have the FTP APPE disabled. This time, the push to server B was successful. Unfortunately, the working tree was not populated. There was a long message explaining this and why it was so, but nevertheless it was a showstopper for me.

Even if this worked, there would potentially be the problem that the .bzr directory is actually part of my website. Probably not a showstopper -- I'd have to configure the server to make that directory's contents inaccessible to HTTP.

Meanwhile, springloops.com works for me. The configuration in this case is that my web host is server B, and springloops is server A. I.e. A and B are different.

Springloops seems to be optimized for website development and deployment. Bazaar seems to be optimized for code base maintenance and release deployment. Although the two are philosophically similar, it may be that you have to optimize for one or the other.

So. getting back to my opening point, it may be counterproductive for you to try to address my problems. A few developers have commented that FTP is somewhat unworthy of their love, and I construe that to mean that making it "just work" may be a source of unending aggravation. And I don't quite understand what it is that does not allow you to populate a remote working directory, but without that I still wouldn't be able to use Bazaar for my purposes.

I guess you could turn my comments around and, rather than concentrate on building a VCS for code development and deployment, you could look at supporting workflows for website development and deployment as well, and that would be great. Mercurial has made a step in that direction - there is a plugin called FTPExtension, but rightly or wrongly I got the feeling it was too bleeding edge for my purposes.

Hope this helps.

I'm beginning to think that satisfying users like me may be counterproductive for your project.

To recap, I'm helping a small group of volunteers to maintain a ski club website.  I'd like to set up version control on server A, and deploy the website content to server B.  I don't mind whether A and B are the same or different.  My main restriction is that my only access to server B is via FTP.  And of course I want the VCS to do the deployment -- it should only update the files that have changed or been added, while deleting those files that have been deleted.

In researching this, I found descriptions of people setting up a VCS on server B,  and using the working tree as the actual website content.  I.e A and B are the same. That meant that deployment was pretty well automatic .. whenever you committed/pushed a change to the VCS, the working tree was updated, and so the website was automatically updated.  But these people were able to use SSH and set up a VCS on their server.  So I couldn't do what they were doing.

I was hoping that I could pull off this trick with Bazaar, because it handled FTP updates of the VCS. Yesterday, I tried making this happen on a host server that didn't have the FTP APPE disabled.  This time, the push to server B was successful.  Unfortunately, the working tree was not populated.  There was a long message explaining this and why it was so, but nevertheless it was a showstopper for me.

Even if this worked, there would potentially be the problem that the .bzr directory is actually part of my website.  Probably not a showstopper -- I'd have to configure the server to make that directory's contents inaccessible to HTTP.

Meanwhile, springloops.com works for me.  The configuration in this case is that my web host is server B, and springloops is server A.  I.e. A and B are different.

Springloops seems to be optimized for website development and deployment.  Bazaar seems to be optimized for code base maintenance and release deployment.  Although the two are philosophically similar, it may be that you have to optimize for one or the other.

So. getting back to my opening point, it may be counterproductive for you to try to address my problems. A few developers have commented that FTP is somewhat unworthy of their love, and I construe that to mean that making it "just work" may be a source of unending aggravation.  And I don't quite understand what it is that does not allow you to populate a remote working directory, but without that I still wouldn't be able to use Bazaar for my purposes.

I guess you could turn my comments around and, rather than concentrate on building a VCS for code development and deployment, you could look at supporting workflows for website development and deployment as well, and that would be great.  Mercurial has made a step in that direction - there is a plugin called FTPExtension, but rightly or wrongly I got the feeling it was too bleeding edge for my purposes.

Hope this helps.