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Discussion on: Where to put the build and deploy scripts?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Forcing a version bump when the build process changes is actually a good thing. In fact, even if you have the build scripts separated from the code, you should still be mandating a version bump on the first build after changing the build scripts.

Quite simply, it's insanely easy for a seemingly innocuous change to the build process to generate completely different code or introduce subtle errors in the application (trivial examples include switching between GCC and clang, enabling or disabling LTO, or tweaking the optimization level of a build). Dealing with the fallout from such a situation is a whole lot easier when you can just look at the version and say 'Oh, that's version x.y.z, it has a bug, you need to either upgrade or downgrade to avoid it.'.

As for deployment scripts, I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter much, provided that your app treats them like a black box (that is, it only cares about the end-state of the deployment, not the intermediary steps).