how can you avoid version nightmare?

Question

I am in charge of the deployment or implementation work.Due to my company's immaturity product,there is a version upgrade serveral days.

Each time there is a upgrade version,I had to notify the customer they had to replace their old version product.What I do is reconfigure all the configuration files for different customers who has its specific needs. Finally email them the new version of products and tell them ...

Doing all this work is boring. Is there anyone have similar experiences? Any advice is welcomed.

More context: I get a updated version from svn respository,it's configuration files is default.And each customer needs serveral configuration files different from each other,but their own configuration files is normally stay unchanged.My work is to export serveral products from the svn folder for each customer and copy their own configuration files in.

Answer 1

This is not "version nightmare". It is un-automated deployment.

In principle you are creating a new version every time a developer checks in new changes. It should be possible to send this version to customers (but if it does not pass QA it shouldn't, naturally).

Most modern systems have an auto-update facility which allows the users to update their software to a newer version either automatically or when they press the update-button. Perhaps this might be an interesting approach if the manual deployments are too cumbersome.

In any case, any tedious, repetitive task which could be automated should probably be considered to be automated. You really want that single-button-press deployment.

Answer 2

reconfigure all the configuration files for different customers who has its specific needs. Finally email them the new version of products and tell them ...

Couldn't this be completely automated? Make a script that takes all customers' needs and email addresses from some kind of database, creates the configuration files according to the each customer's specific needs, packages the product separately for each customer, and emails it to them?

Python is a good language for this kind of systems.