[Zope] Version Control in Zope / Managing releases

Bob Crosley bobc@hilgraeve.com
Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:31:00 -0400


As our development team grows, and our application grows more complex,
version control in Zope becomes more problematic.  I'm trying to do
some research into the different techniques people are using to manage
application development.

Here's our current situation.
*We have a web application that contains both your standard web
site/marketing copy type pages, and the application itself.
*We have a team of 7 developers including application developers and
HTML coders/Graphic Artists.

We have a number of problems we're trying to solve.  If you have a
solution that's worked for you for any of these problems, I'd love to
hear about it.

1) "Code Collisions."  - Developers overwriting each other's work.
2) Partial updates - Right now, we have new pages for marketing
content that are held up because we don't have our new features for
the application done yet.  So we can't update marketing pages without
updating the app at the same time, (one ZODB) unless we directly
update the production servers. (Eeek!)

We looked at ZCVSMixin for a solution to problem 1, and it shows a lot
of promise but isn't quite there yet.  For problem 2, we considered
the idea of running two Zopes for the app, using one to serve the
marketing pages, and one for the application pages so they could be
updated independently.  Has anyone done that?  We have images and
appearance attributes stored in the ZODB and don't want to have to
keep seperate sets of those, so any solution would have to be able to
draw off the same images and appearance variables.

Any feedback anyone can provide would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Bob