[erikb]

Deployment is hard, system administration is hard. As a software developer you think there should be one way but there can't be one way. There never will be. If you want to make good software really spend some time learning the intricacies of packaging, deployment and sysadmin life. You make a lot of people happy by just knowing the problems, even if you can't apply the correct solution to each problem.

Come from the same island as you, trust me. But the more you learn about this the more you see how complex it is. You can't even say that one solution is better than the other (like apt vs yum). Each and every one of them has their pros and cons. And more often than not architectural decisions make it impossible to get both solutions into the same system working together.

rSync is not deploying. It's syncing files. But even if you have a 1:1 copy from your development computer on a server it still might not work because on that server package xyz is still in version 1.4.3b and not 1.4.3c. Deployment is getting it there AND getting it to work together nicely and maintainable with the other things that run on that computer/vm.