[plug] Source control for webapplications

[Matthew Lambie]

Hi there,

I saw Cameron's talk yesterday about Arch which has sparked my interest
in using it in out environment, where until now we've used a very manual
approach to revision control (ie, the cp -R he mentioned on the first
slide ;) I'm looking for feedback or guidance on what others use in a
similar setup.

Our situation is: we do a fair bit of application development using PHP
and MySQL. Our developers have laptops running Ubuntu, and until now
they've worked via SSH to the servers. This works fine in that they
don't work 'on the road' and fast access to the servers is always
available. What I was thinking is using something like Arch to manage
their source code on their laptops, and replicate with the server. They
can run local Apache and MySQL servers and do the development on their
machines.

The only issue I can see (apart from making sure they have the same
version of Apache/PHP/MySQL on their laptops as we have on the
production servers) is keeping the databases in sync. Can you automate
something like a mysqldump from within Arch, so that checking out source
would check out the DB schema and some test data, or would that need to
be handled external to the revision system?

I see this as being a little different to managing a bunch of C source
files because it relies on something external to the revision system. Am
I correct? I'd be interested to know how others manage their sizable web
application developments with respect to revision control. 

-- 

Thanks,

Matthew Lambie