On 31 Dec 15:16, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 01:55:28PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 31 Dec 12:30, Chris G wrote:
On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 08:08:53PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
[snip]
Installing web applications rarely seems so easy and you always end up wondering whether you've put it in the right place.
Nope, I really don't. On the other hand, I've been doing this for probably the best part of 9 years.
Well if you want to pull that sort of seniority thing I've been developing software for 35 years or so. Length of experience doesn't necessarily equate with wisdom! ... and that applies to both of us :-)
Software development isn't the same as web development, as many many people will be able to tell you, if we were just hitting software development then I started back in christmas of 1986 with a 48k spectrum, back when I was 5. Software development in and of itself doesn't tell you how to lay out a system for easy modification later, heck, my development environment for somethings is quite a lot different to my production environment - where the development environment is a single chroot running 3 tomcats and 2 different long term java processes on a single machine and the production environment being 4 seperate machines, a whole host of key sharing, and a fairly serious set of boxes (the main box doing the backend has 32G of ram and some seriously nice 2.5" disks using a fairly nice RAID controller, with LVM layered on top - at that point, layout is everything, and consistancy is very much a requirement - other people have to admin those machines when I'm on holiday - so making sure that it's documented and that people know where to find things is very very much a requirement).
Given that yum will actually let you run through an upgrade these days, why are you doing a reinstall? Sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of gain to me - and occasionally - just occasionally - it even warns you of configuration file format changes!
Well it's a bit difficult to move from Slackware to Fedora without doing a clean install. It also appears from the Fedora users list that upgrading from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 isn't always straightforward.
Doing a re-install also has the advantage of discarding the junk that slowly accumulates over upgrades.
This is where using a system that has a decent package management structure is much more useful, though. (We run 99% of our software on debian systems, some of our customers run RHEL so we also test on CentOS 4 and 5 systems - both of which we have "laying about" and we try as far as possible to keep to packaged software or create our own packages in most cases. Being able to ask the package management system where xyz is installed is a god send for a lot of situations.