What's the best practice for handling system-specific information under version control?

Question

I\'m new to version control, so I apologize if there is a well-known solution to this. For this problem in particular, I\'m using git, but I\'m curious about how to deal wit

Answer 1

You should always separate historization (what a Source Control is for) from deployment.

A deployment involves:

• an identified set of data (for which a tag or label provided by the SCM comes in handy)
• a process manipulating those data (for at least copying them at the right place, but also expanding some compressed files, and so on...)

Amongst the various operation a deployment does, you should include a de-variabilization phase.

A variable is a keyword representing anything likely to change depending on your deployment platform (which can be a PC for continuous integration, a linux for basic homologation, an old Solaris8 for pre-production homologation, and a Full F15K Solaris10 with zones for production: it short it can varies a lot). See Jonathan Leffler's answer for practical examples.

A variable can represent a path, a JVM version, some JVM settings and so on, and what you are putting in an SCM should be a data with variables in it, never hard-coded settings.

The next step would be to include in your executable a way to detect any change in a setting files in order to update while running some parameters (avoiding the the all "shutdown / change settings / restart" sequence).
That means they are two types of deployment variables:

• static ones (which will never change),
• dynamic ones (which should be ideally taken into account during the runtime session)