Thursday, January 5, 2017

I continued to work on #1189. This ticket is advancing slowly because our way of communicating. The customer wants to increase the foolproofness of their releases, so they ask to release to a testing site first, which they review when I tell them that it is ready. Their production site is running a Welfare version from January 2016. In December 2016 they started to want some new features and asked me to deploy a new version to their testlino. It took them some weeks to test it and report a series of problems. It took me another few weeks before diving back into this.

The first thing I did was an new upgrade of their testlino. This is a kind of routine process where I simply pull the latest repository versions and then restore a snapshot of their production data. But last time I did this, I obviously did a few migrations manually. So now I have to do them again (Lino of course reminded me this in e.g. #1353). In order to avoid to do them a third time in the future, I now wrote migrators for this. Writing a migrator takes a bit more time than doing it manually, but it has the obvious advantage of being reusable. Note that this advantage is only an advantage when re-usability makes sense. All our production sites are currently in development mode and therefore it is rather overkill to write migrators. OTOH this is a good test for stable hosting scenarios which are likely to come soon.