On 19 Feb 2009, at 20:07, Matt Pitts wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Rolsky [mailto:auta...@urth.org]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:21 PM
To: The elegant MVC web framework
Subject: RE: [Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Matt Pitts wrote:
I myself am currently trying to support multiple developers (content
&
perl) working on a Catalyst app from Windows desktops and it's been
a
<snip>
Getting _way_ off-topic, but if your target environment is Linux,
this
is
insane. VMWare is easy to set up and would let your Windows developer
run
the app in something much closer to its target environment.
Thanks for the input...
VMs were considered as an option, but since the Windows folks aren't
Linux-savvy, this means even more systems I have to maintain, perl
CPAN,
updates, etc.
Where are you finding perl programmers from who can't use ubuntu?
Also, how does having people building software for a platform they're
unfamiliar with work for you?
Not to mention the system resources used by the VM which
could be quite taxing on some of our developers' systems. For me, this
was the insane option.
I'm sorry, but if you're not prepared to buy your developers
reasonable workstations then you've already lost - it doesn't take
much effort to do a cost/benefit analysis and the cost of developing
on a platform which (a) is causing you pain, and (b) is nothing like
your production environment.
This cost cannot be trivial even with the simple factors, and even
higher once you factor less easy to analyze things such as the
additional risk of your software having had less testing an the
correct environment, and the staff motiviation as developing your
application sounds painful.
How many days of lost time/work is the cost of a reasonable
workstation? 2, 3? Less than a week certainly..
The highest cost to a knowledge based organisation is human
resources, and so not providing your people the right kit to do their
jobs effectively is just cutting your own throat.
In reality, two of the devs _are_ currently running the app on
Linux, in
their $HOME on a shared DEV server, and using Samba to access their
$HOME from windows. This setup has its own issues that I won't go
into.
Shared dev servers are fail to start with for a number of reasons -
each developer needs their own environment they can mess up as they
wish.
That aside, I don't see why there is any need to share a home
directory between where you're developing and where your workstation
is - all your code is in revision control, right? I suppose you'd
want this if you used a graphical editor, but remote X works nicely
in cygwin, so that could theoretically be a solution (other than the
fact that having several people run a desktop environment on the same
box is going to suck pretty quickly).
I'd recommend having a 'standard' development vmware rig which people
can download, use, trash (and delete / get another one when they
trash) isn't any more effort to setup than 1 new machine +
development environment.
Keeping it up to date after that is again keeping 1 machine up to date.
Don't worry about the individual workstations, they're disposable
(and developers should be able to say sudo apt-get upgrade or
equivalent).. Again, if you _can't_ get your development environment
down to this level of isolation, then something is horribly, horribly
wrong somewhere..
Anyway, this is a long story, I'll stop ranting. My point was just
that
there is no easy way to "just run" the Cat app in Windows.
I do feel your pain, but I think that's down to the modules you're
using in your application, rather than Catalyst itself (which as many
people will attest, installs and runs fine on windows).
Cheers
t0m
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