thinking about process, wondering if we can easily do better

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 10:10 -0700, Bill Barry wrote:
> so... I was thinking about the way we are doing things in house here and 
> I was wondering if there would be a better way to do this. Currently we 
> have a process for getting our skin packages (zip files) for our 
> application up to date in our working copies. That is to say currently 
> we are versioning the zip files themselves. Currently we do the following:
> "Programmer 1" - let's call her Sally
> 
> Sally would not consider herself a programmer; she would call herself a 
> skin designer. Mostly her work is:
> create a skin by manually creating .css files and html template files 
> with the occasional jpg, etc
> package up the skin into a zip file so that it can be used by the installer
> make sure the skin installs (a special file called the manifest needs to 
> be correct)
> put the skin zip file in a special folder, possibly overwritting 
> pre-existing skin
> remove old skins
> call hg addremove, hg commit, and hg push (possibly hg pull, hg update, 
> and maybe hg merge somewhere)
> 
> on the other side:
> "Programmer 2" - let's call him Bill
> "Programmer 3" - let's call him Fred
> 
> Bill and Fred make actual code changes to the application and store the 
> source for it in their repositories. All 3 pull and push to the same 
> central repository location and see Sally's changes as opaque zip files. 
> Every once in a while Bill or Fred need to see the actual change made in 
> Sally's zip files; to do so they need to get both versions, extract them 
> and then manually compare them.

If you're going to fiddle with your process, why not make the zip files
build products and check in the -actual source- instead? Sally would
probably be just as happy to type 'make' as 'zip', which might build a
manifest for her too.

ps: Your example is a little too real. Sally might have considered a
career in programming if there wasn't a pervasive gender bias in the
field held over from the 50s. The very least we can do is apply some
affirmative action to our examples.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.