
Dropbox plus Mercurial -driven development. Anyone tried that? - nocivus
http://pedroassuncao.com/2011/02/dropbox-plus-mercurial-driven-development-anyone-tried-that/
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kls
_This way any changes to the source code would be instantly reflected on
production._

This is universally a bad idea, you should never want anything other than
maybe a text change to go to production with a click of the save button. There
are just too many issues it can create. Even if you are a 1 man shop and the
app you are working on is insignificant, saving to prod is a really bad habit
to get into.

The reason being is it's power is seductive once you start working that way
you cant turn back, everything else seems slow and time consuming, so when you
get into a larger environment you skip steps and it causes a lot of problems
for other people. I had a developer once who worked like that, he was really,
really, really good, but he had this bad habit of dropping the files directly
to production, and saying well it was just a little change. We ended up having
to get rid of him because he created a host of problems by always trying to
circumvent the process.

Files would not get into version control, but would be on production so next
drop reverted stuff, test environments where not in sync with prod, we had to
restrict developers rights on machines, it was a mess. Anyways point is, I
think the Mercurial dropbox thing is a good idea, but don't get in the habit
of saving directly to prod, it can become a very nasty habit to break.

