NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

Eric K. wrote on Saturday, September 03, 2005 2:34 AM:
> During the last NYPHP Andrew & Jeff gave an interesting talk on SVN which
> left me with a couple of questions... 
> 
> 1) One of SVN's advantages was that it only saves file deltas and not a
> copy of the file. Isn't this unsafe? What if some newbie sysadmin(!!)
> botches my original file or one of my early commits, won't that
> invalidated all my subsequent commits

As Andrew points out, svn isn't a backup, recovery, or retention solution.  In fact, it could be considered a point of vulnerability, just like any other source repository.  There are two things well protected in this world:  Microsoft's and Oracle's source repositories.

Seriously though, the SVN server should have a regular backup routine, and it's always a good idea to keep at least 5 days of backups.  Basically the facets of any good backup strategy - geographic duplicity, off-site archival, retention, etc. - all apply here.

> 2) Is there a shortcut to speed up development or must I duplicate the
> entire server/dev environment in every developer's workspace?

This is basically what my presentation covered, and we'll get those slides online soon.  The short version is that by using a combination of technologies - Windows XP, Eclipse, WebDrive, and either WebDAV, SFTP or even FTP - a team of developers can work on a single server.  This has a couple of key advantages:

-- no need to recreate the dev environment multiple times
-- no code/environment drift.  Even if you set up environments exactly the same, it's inevitable that the developers will want to tweak their settings, resulting in unexpected results when deployed.
-- developers can use the platform of their choice as a workstation, whether it be Windows, Mac or UNIX


---
Hans Zaunere / President / New York PHP
www.nyphp.com