Version control and release management

Question

Are there any so-called "version control systems" that also support actual release management / deployment ?

The mainframe shop I used to work for, had an automated release management tool that did not only control concurrent modifications to sources, but that also took care of running compilers, precompilers, database bind utilities etc. etc., making it our fully automated deployment tool as well.

My understanding is that "more modern" version control tools support only the source management part. Is that understanding correct ?

Answer 1

This is absolutely incorrect. Any modern version control tool supports both pre and post commit hooks, at which point you can run any code you want.

In subversion, we use the post-commit hook to deploy a copy of the app to the dev server every time a developer checks in code.

In our actual production servers, we have code that verifies and then deploys stable minor version tags as they are committed to the repo by the release managers.

Answer 2

In the ruby on rails world Capistrano is the deployment tool of choice.

http://www.capify.org/index.php/Capistrano