[wpkg-users] test packages upgrades

[Malte Starostik]

Am Montag, 21. Dezember 2009 15:50:18 schrieb Jason Oster:
> On 12/20/2009 01:44 AM, Andrea Zagli wrote:
> > how can i do to test packages upgrades on only one test machine before
> > to propagate the upgrade to all others production machines?
> >
> > thanks in advance
> 
> I've been meaning to set up a second share directory on my Samba server
> with WPKG packages. My test workstation would check-in with that
> directory instead of the normal one. Use symlinks for the software and
> most of the XML packages; use real files only when testing.
> 
> I don't have detailed information, sorry. But there is more information
> on this kind of idea in the list archives somewhere!

I use something like that.  There are two copies of the base dir and 
%SOFTWARE% and I use rsync to apply changes from the test "staging" hierarchy 
to the "production" one.  While this means a lot of duplicated data, I do keep 
two copies of %SOFTWARE% so I can safely delte outdated stuff in there and/or 
change scripts before they are visible to production clients.  The staging 
clients are both virtual machines just for testing as well as some of our 
administrative workstations where a failed upgrade doesn't impact too many 
things.
As we have some installations - notably MS Office in manually installed before 
we migrated to WPKG - that fail miserably when the path to the MSIs changes, I 
don't configure anything on the client to choose between staging and 
production repositories.  Instead, there is a preconnect script for the samba 
shares that sets up symlinks according to the client's IP, so the UNC paths as 
seen by the clients are always the same.

Cheers,
Malte