[ic] Risks of websites served from Subversion or CVS checkouts

[Peter]

On 08/19/2008 07:58 PM, Jon Jensen wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Peter wrote:
> 
>>> If you use Subversion or CVS on any project, I recommend you look into how
>>> your files are being served and see if there's anything being exposed.
>> Just a side note, that this is bad practice anyways.
> 
> A matter of opinion, and I disagree.
> 
>> You should maintain your CVS, SVN, GIT, etc repositories separately from 
>> your running copy of IC.  It is a good idea to use the standard, perl 
>> Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install method to install your 
>> running copy of IC (as well as other programs) as this method does not 
>> copy the CVS, SVN, etc directories anyways, plus it checks certain 
>> system dependencies and sets variables, etc.
> 
> I think Perl's ExtUtils::MakeMaker (Makefile.PL) is a terrible way to roll 
> out a complex Interchange site comprised of Interchange, admin, catalog 
> ITL, custom Perl modules, HTML docroot, CSS, JavaScript, database DDL 
> ("migration") files, etc.
> 
> Version control systems have worked quite well at this for me. They also 
> provide a sane way to deal with any intentional or unintentional changes 
> made in production (such as mv_metadata.asc, page edits by administrative 
> users, shipping.asc, etc.) and provide a way to do code rollouts.

Actually I do a combination of both.  I keep the version control 
separate but I make any needed core changes there (those are rare and 
usually end up in the IC core anyways).  Other than that, IC is 
sufficiently flexible for core add-ons (usertags, perl modules, etc) to 
easily survive upgrades made in the traditional manner.  Catalogs do not 
get automatically upgraded.

I just think it's a very bad idea to allow version control to directly 
update a running site.

Peter