Updating and upgrading live sites

I’m sneaking this idea in right before the deadline, because I just read a post on drupal.org about this very problem. It was a popular topic of conversation in Barcelona, so perhaps it deserves it’s own session. I’d be happy to facilitate.

SESSION OVERVIEW
If you maintain a live site, and one or more development copies of the site, you’ve no doubt run into this problem: how to get all the changes from your development copy into the live site? The changes could include new nodes, terms, etc. or changes to existing variables and content. What can you do if different objects on your production and development site have the same id in the database?

In this session we’ll discuss these issues, our attempts to solve them, and the merits of various approaches.

TRACK
This birds of a feather is aimed at developers with a technical knowledge of databases and how drupal and third-party modules store data.

AGENDA
Since this is a BOF, there will be discussion, more than a set agenda. I hope that anyone attending who has tried to tackle these problems will share their approach. We’ll discuss the relative pros and cons. With any luck, we’ll come to consensus on an approach that would fit the needs of most of us.

GOALS
The best case scenario is that a team of developers emerges to work on a module that helps all of us deal with these issues.

RESOURCES
There have been numerous threads on this topic, and that is my inspiration for suggesting the topic. Here are some:

http://www.dave-cohen.com/node/1779
http://groups.drupal.org/node/786
http://drupal.org/node/181128
http://drupal.org/node/140430