Hi gang,
As you may have seen if you actually read all the merge proposal email you get <wink>, as part of my quest to get us closer to a continuous delivery stype of development I've written a script that updates a LAVA instance to the tip of trunk of all the various LAVA components. I will set things up so that this runs every night on the staging instance soon (need to fiddle things somehow so that a sudo password isn't necessary to restart the instance after the code is upgraded).
However, Spring is right now using the staging instance to test some dispatcher changes. If I'd set the cronjob I refer to above up and Spring was particularly unlucky, the cronjob would wipe out the changes he's made to the instance to test while he's testing them. This seems less than ideal.
Because what we do is always going to be hard to test outside a production like environment, I think what we need is yet another instance: one that we can hack about relentlessly as needed to test changes that we haven't yet landed. I propose the name "dogfood" for this (maybe we'd even go as far as having scripts that completely removed the dogfood instance and could recreate it as needed to ensure a clean baseline).
So we'd have:
* production: duh * staging: this is _solely_ used to determine if changes that have landed to the trunk of some component are safe to deploy to production * dogfood: random hacking
I think that potentially we could have some way of bringing up dogfood instances as needed in our private cloud, but tbh for now one on control that we share amongst ourselves in a loose way (i.e. check on IRC before doing stuff with it) would be a useful thing.
What do you guys think?
Cheers, mwh