release-management

This is a cousin question with my earlier question of "How to manage concurrent development with mercurial", which covers individual developer workflow. The answer to this question will actually influence the choice for developer workflow. This is NOT a general "release management best practice" or CI question, as it has been asked many times with good answers, and there's a huge body of literature available to kill time. I'm only asking for specific ways to use mercurial within the context of release management . The most obvious and predominant answer would supposedly be stable/default ,

I have a system in production that has several servers in several roles. I would like to test a new app server by deploying to that specific server, without having to redeploy to every server in production. Is there a way to ask Capistrano to deploy to a specific server? Ideally I'd like to be able to run something like cap SERVER=app2.example.com ROLE=app production deploy if I just wanted to deploy to app2.example.com. Thanks! [update] I tried the solution suggested by wulong by executing: cap HOSTS=app2.server.hostname ROLE=app qa deploy but capistrano seemed be trying to execute tasks for

Is there something like InstallShield that I can use for free? lubos hasko WiX Very powerful and flexible . Can produce MSI packages (Microsoft deployment format of choice) Almost no documentation Very steep learning curve. XML-based. Recommended for very complex installators. Inno Setup Cannot produce MSI packages. Its scripting part looks like INI files structure. Uses Pascal Script based language for extra flexibility. NSIS Cannot produce MSI packages. Fully scripted, very powerful but at cost of high learning curve. Recommened if WiX is too much and Inno Setup not enough. AdvancedInstaller

I'm building an Android application and would like to maintain a few environment variables that I can tweak depending on whether I'm in development mode or release mode. For example, I need to invoke a web service and the URL will be slightly different in either mode. I'd like to externalize this and other settings so I can change them easily based on my target deployment. Are there any best practices or anything in the SDK to assist with this need? yincrash According to this stackoverflow post , in SDK Tools version 17 (we're on 19 as of this writing) adds a BuildConfig.DEBUG constant that is

I have a property file with the following junit.version=3.8.1 dbcp.version=5.5.27 oracle.jdbc.version=10.2.0.2.0 I try to read those properties from my pom file as shown below <dependency> <groupId>junit</groupId> <artifactId>junit</artifactId> <version>${junit.version}</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>dbcp</groupId> <artifactId>dbcp</artifactId> <version>${dbcp.version}</version> <scope>provided</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>com.oracle</groupId> <artifactId>ojdbc14</artifactId> <version>${oracle.jdbc.version}</version> <scope>provided</scope> <

My question is, which version-naming scheme should be used for what type of project. Very common is major.minor.fix, but even this can lead to 4 number (i.e. Firefox 2.0.0.16). Some have a model that odd numbers indicate developer-versions and even numbers stable releases. And all sorts of additions can enter the mix, like -dev3, -rc1, SP2 etc. Exists reasons to prefer one scheme over another and should different type of projects (i.e. Open Source vs. Closed Source) have different version naming schemes? There are two good answers for this (plus a lot of personal preferences, see gizmo's