Build your ideal system on your isolated machine. Once you have it built (Perl / DBD modules / apache / mod_perl / mod_ssl / database / etc), take a snapshot. Ghost is good for this, but any backup/restore will do.

I strongly agree with most of your points, but taking snapshots is a very effective way to be in the same boat a few years down the road when you have to do the migration again. Especially if your starting point involves cloning a developer desktop machine. You might as well be doing brain surgery in a crack house!

I've been down the system cloning road and here's what I do to avoid it:

The thing you want to do, while you're building your ideal system, is to document the living daylights out of the setup process and automate as many steps as possible. For example, rather than documenting all 50 CPAN modules you need to install, create a new module with all the dependencies already mapped out (Makefile.PL's PM_PREREQ, for example). Installing it should suck in everything else you need. Put your web server configurations into your SCM.

The final goal is that a literate monkey can take bare metal and some CD-ROMs and just build your ideal system from scratch in a few hours. Repeatedly. And if it's not the identical O/S with the identical version of perl, apache, etc, having a repeatable process should work around all the little details like binary compatibility and whatnot. As long as it passes the acceptance tests. That's a non-negotiable failure point.

c.

In reply to Re^2: Finally! Saying goodbye to perl 5.005 by beauregard
in thread Finally! Saying goodbye to perl 5.005 by the_slycer

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