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by swidi 1526 days ago
How are any of these simpler than "Get VM, install server, rsync files"? Why is the solution always "sign up for a proprietary service that might not exist next year and rig up a bunch of fragile webhooks"?

Also, I don't use Git or Github.
4 comments
kadoban 1526 days ago
It's simpler from a certain point of view, namely one where you don't want to have to maintain the VM.

It's more complicated because you need to know more random tech that I bet you don't want to learn. Which is fine, it's really not necessary.

By the way, you should learn git sometime. Or there's a couple other VCSes that are somewhat known, but git is both good and has good networking effects (everyone uses it).

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swidi 1526 days ago
I prefer Mercurial, and as a hobbyist I can afford to stay with it. I know Git has GitHub and all the connectivity of that, but I just truly dislike Git.
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raffraffraff 1526 days ago
Ah, I didn't see that you use mercurial instead of git when I made my last comment.

I'd love to be able to make red-line decisions like this regardless, no matter what. For example, I absolutely hate MacOS and would love to say "hard no" to any job offer if they insist that I use MacOS, regardless of job fit or TC. But ultimately, I back down once they show me the money, and find myself using it anyway.

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kadoban 1526 days ago
That works, as long as you know one of them.
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raffraffraff 1526 days ago
I agree about the fragile frameworks but not the rest.

In this case I'd say that "simple" is a product of familiarity, manual steps, and future maintenance. "Get a VM" also means "install stuff on a VM", "secure a VM", "monitor load, memory, disk space on a VM" and "manage a VM into the future, upgrading the host OS and fixing whatever breaks". Is rsync easier than git? Maybe, but it doesn't have version control (which is nice to have). I think the git suggestions are based on the assumption that only a tiny number of people could do VM setup, webserver config, rsync etc but couldn't do git add, commit and push.

Personally, I use Cloudflare because it handles DNS, CDN and is basically hands-off after setup.

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dorfsmay 1526 days ago
* no need to install and configure OS

* No need to install and configure web server

* No need to setup firewall

* No need to main and patch above components every day

* No need to upgrade the OS every few months/years

I have not used mercurial in close to a decade, but from what I can remember you could push to a git server from the mercurial client.

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digianarchist 1526 days ago
I'm an SRE and I'll say that all of these services are far simpler than configuring, maintaining and monitoring a VM.

If you want to maintain your Mercurial setup then consider S3 + Cloudfront.

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