[clue-admin] CVS Publishing Script

[David Anselmi]

Jed S. Baer wrote:
[...]
> This all works, except for the step of moving the symbolic link. I get no
> errors from the 'ln -sf' command (or 'ls -s -f' either). But the link
> stays put on the old directory. I can't figure out why this is.
> 
> If I copy the ln command from the webserver output, and paste it to the
> command line, it works.

On my system I can't reproduce what you describe as "working from the 
command line".

Here's what I tried:

ln -sf A WEBSITE ; ln -sf B WEBSITE

You'd expect this to make a symbolic link to directory A and then change 
it to point to directory B.  If A and B were regular files that's what 
it does.  But since they are directories the second command creates a 
link named B in the directory WEBSITE (which is actually A).  The man 
page seems clear enough if you realize the second command will 
dereference WEBSITE.

Looks like what you want is to add -n to avoid the dereference.

The nice thing about repointing the symlink is that it's atomic.  But 
I'm not sure that matters since old files may still be open.  So maybe 
just renaming directories is good enough (dunno though, I don't see any 
reason not to do it this way).  In that case though, I'd export straight 
to $NEWDIR.  What do you gain by exporting to /tmp and then tar'ing 
across (which could also be a cp it seems)?

Do you really want -D today in the export?  Seems like you can only do 
one update a day then.  Fine if you sync the web site from a daily cron 
job, but not what you want if you want your change up now.  You could 
use -r HEAD (or perhaps that's the default).  For a more formal system 
(with tags on the actual release code) you'd want to accept arbitrary -r 
arguments (probably not necessary here).

Finally, you might want to add some error checking/handling.  You have a 
comment that says "if successful, remove the tmp export" but you didn't 
actually check that anything succeded.

I use rsync on my web site (and I sync across the network out of a CVS 
working copy rather than a temp export, with some paranoia checks thrown 
in).  There's an rsync option to delete target files that don't exist in 
the source.  I guess that's a little overkill for this case, though 
rsync over ssh might give you better security than the .htaccess 
protected page we used to use (maybe you've already addressed that).

I'm interested in hearing other ideas.

Dave