[EP-tech] Re: Change management

[Jan Ploski]

Hi,

To clarify: I guess I'm mostly concerned about the "configuration stuff" 
which happend at the database level, and about transferring such changes 
from dev/staging into production or withdrawing them from production if 
need be.

I also experienced this same dilemma with the Drupal CMS and was shocked 
how late in its history some sensible practices and tools were 
introduced (before that admins were supposed to replicate every change 
through the GUI manually or to invent their own solutions).

So I'd just like to make sure that I'm not overlooking any official 
techniques in EPrints.

My own approach to dealing with this in other projects is basically to 
make everything either resident in the file system (and only there) or 
exportable/importable from the database. The reason is that established 
version control tools all work (perfectly) with file systems - the 
problem is "solved" there - but none understand databases (nor should 
they have to).

Regards,
Jan Ploski

John Salter wrote:
> I've been pondering this - and trying to do things *the right way*.
> One possibility is make everything possible into a EPrints Bazaar plugin (you don't have to publish it to the world!).
> Keeping that under source control, and then installing it on your dev/QA server might be an interesting route to go down!?
>
> Cheers,
> John
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: eprints-tech-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:eprints-tech-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Jan Ploski
> Sent: 26 July 2012 15:04
> To: eprints-tech at ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Subject: [EP-tech] Change management
>
> Hi,
>
> Is there a comprehensive list of which EPrints configuration details are
> stored in the file system and which in the database? Are all
> configuration settings stored in the database exportable/importable
> to/from the file system?
>
> Background: although little tweaks via GUI may seem appealing for small
> installations, in general they sound like asking for trouble. Ideally,
> I'd like to have all configuration changes pass through version control
> and also through a staging (test) system. This is required for
> documentation and also for signing off changes by the client before they
> are brought into production. Is anyone else using EPrints in this
> manner? Are there recommended administration practices (except for
> "backup before changes" - restoring backups may be quite problematic if
> the data moves forward after changes)? Or is everyone just crossing
> their fingers and tweaking their production EPrints directly?
>
> Regards,
> Jan Ploski
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