Hi, On 28/11/16 at 12:04 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > We are running a multitude of services. > > Our usual approach to these services is that we fix things when they > break, test our client code against the live instance (with perhaps a > special area of the database - eg the `experimental' suite). I have > found writing server-side software in this environment is awkward. My > own service has a test suite which sets up a stunt environment, but > inevitably stunt environments in test suites are much less like the > real thing than a staging instance. > > Should we not have public test instances of all these things ?
No. I think that we should rather push for using tools such as Vagrant or Docker to provide a way to easily create development environments for services. My experience of using Vagrant for that purpose at $DAY_JOB was very successful. The main advantage, of course, is that each developer gets its own throw-away development environment. This is already done for UDD. See https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-qa/udd.git/plain/Vagrantfile and https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-qa/udd.git/plain/vagrant/provision.sh (which both could probably be improved, of course) Lucas