psenn
asked on
Collaboration
I have been put in charge of coming up with a plan for checkin/checkout.
This isn't as straight-forward as it seems.
There are 3 developers, including me.
We have a production server and a test server.
So I'm thinking of TURNING OFF the check in / check out feature on the production server. The reason being: We should have a policy that all development is done on the test server, and after the change has been made, it is copied to the production server.
Since no development is done on the production server, there's no need to check anything out.
Is that wrong?
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Now onto the test server.... The test server is refreshed periodically from the production machine. That way we have a mirror image of the production box. If Chris is in the process of changing something, then when he comes into the office in the morning, he should sync his local with the remote.
The bottom line is this: I'm thinking of turning off "check out/in" for the test system as well!
If Chris and Jim are clobbering each other on the test system, then no harm done - that's a management problem to begin with - two people working on the same web page. I'm only worried about them clobbering each other on the production server.
If we only had 1 production server, I can understand the need for check out/in. But we have a production server and a test server.
Here is my question:
What's the best practice for team development in Dreamweaver, limited to making sure person A doesn't overwrite person B's changes.
This isn't as straight-forward as it seems.
There are 3 developers, including me.
We have a production server and a test server.
So I'm thinking of TURNING OFF the check in / check out feature on the production server. The reason being: We should have a policy that all development is done on the test server, and after the change has been made, it is copied to the production server.
Since no development is done on the production server, there's no need to check anything out.
Is that wrong?
-----
Now onto the test server.... The test server is refreshed periodically from the production machine. That way we have a mirror image of the production box. If Chris is in the process of changing something, then when he comes into the office in the morning, he should sync his local with the remote.
The bottom line is this: I'm thinking of turning off "check out/in" for the test system as well!
If Chris and Jim are clobbering each other on the test system, then no harm done - that's a management problem to begin with - two people working on the same web page. I'm only worried about them clobbering each other on the production server.
If we only had 1 production server, I can understand the need for check out/in. But we have a production server and a test server.
Here is my question:
What's the best practice for team development in Dreamweaver, limited to making sure person A doesn't overwrite person B's changes.
ASKER
Another department within the company is using a program called STAT.
www.quest.com
He suggests making the production server read-only to everyone except the STAT login.
I've turned off "Warn when opening read-only files" in Preferences (Ctrl-U), and "Check out files when opening" in Manage Sites, "Remote Info".
You said you had two people "working on several sites and pages on ONE server". That's not my situation. I have two people working on one site, but there is a development server and a production server.
www.quest.com
He suggests making the production server read-only to everyone except the STAT login.
I've turned off "Warn when opening read-only files" in Preferences (Ctrl-U), and "Check out files when opening" in Manage Sites, "Remote Info".
You said you had two people "working on several sites and pages on ONE server". That's not my situation. I have two people working on one site, but there is a development server and a production server.
If you use something like Visual Source Safe (or CVS) you will have all the versions saved, this can be invlauable when someone has "overwritten" your changes, as you can compare both versions (using VSS's inbuilt differenceing or windiff) and include the best bits from both.
Stephen
Stephen
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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Ideally it would be better if you can keep DW and VSS seperate. When a file is in checked in state. It will appear in readonly mode in DW file manager. When you check it out (not through DW. Through VSS diretcly), it will turn into write mode. That would be better. The DW check in/check out is not fool proof.
-Uday
-Uday
We have found that (for whatever reason) the checkin /checkout feature doesnt work for us. We have lost ENTIRE sites due to this. DW would 'let' me overwrite the newest version of his....I mean that it would show me as having it checked out, on my side. Have it checked out by him on his side and let me copy over his newer version.
One thing that we have found to HELP is to always,ALWAYS check everything back in , and GET the version that is on the server (reguardless of if it has changed).
Note:
we have atempted to fix this problem, reinstalling, debugging and troubleshooting, but we could only reproduce these results when we didnt want to (when time really counted on a progect)
Bottom line,
I think you are on the right track by setting office rules about the test server and let them fight it out, and NOT relying on the sofetware to prohibit loss of data.
Everything else I wrote is just FYI.
Rockman