Python Deployment Anti-Patterns

Post by chromatic » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 6:42 PM UTC

pconf wrote: post #120

mdehaan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chef requires Ruby programming. Puppet doesn't, but the core is obviously Ruby, and you extend it using Ruby. You may possibly like my new project: http://ansible.github.com The core is Python but you can write modules in any language.

Thanks for that! We gave up on chef when one of their version updates failed to work with a prior version, both of which were the OS package defaults. Chef silently failed, no error message, nothing in the docs, nothing even in the source code. Had to do a fair bit of searching to find out why. When open source projects like chef have nobody interested in even documenting much less testing backwards incompatibilities…

Post by chromatic » Tue, May 01, 2012, 6:15 AM UTC

pconf wrote: post #122

chromatic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said we are at least talking about python, which has had better release QA and backwards compatibility than perl.... I'm curious as to your experience here. I've found that Perl has by far the best backwards compatibility and release QA of the major dynamic languages. What did you encounter?

We don't use as much perl as we used to but the last upgrade issue was amavisd-new (a Spamassassin wrapper). Spamassassin has perl version issues every so often as well. NetDNS used to introduce new bugs about every 4th revision but seems to have been stable for the past couple of years. GNUmp3d and many audio libraries have non-perl revision-related, backwards-compatibility issues with some regularity.

Post by serverascode » Thu, May 03, 2012, 3:29 AM UTC

hynek wrote: post #109

serverascode wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like if you do one then you can do 100. Not the case.

My public services don’t have 100 dependencies and that’s on purpose. Relying on magic distribution fairies for all your libraries is a IMHO a false sense of security, YMMV. How do you make sure that whenever one of your dependencies gets updated that your daemons get restarted? And what do you do if you need a package that isn’t part of your distribution?