[Catalyst] cross-platform development setup

[Nathan Kurz]

I'm about to set something up for our small development group (mixed
between Mac, Windows, Linux), and wanted to run my potential solution
by folks more experienced with this than I.  The development is for a
small public website, with rolling releases to the live site.

I'm planning to use Subversion as a version control system, and that
part of the equation seems pretty straightforward: run a repository on
a Linux machine, people check things in at will, commits are
automatically pushed to a test server, live site is updated when
stable.  The hard part is that people on machines without a Catalyst
environment want to test their changes before committing them.

In line with a previous discussion
<http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/catalyst/users/8366>, I'm
planning to have a separate incarnation of the Catalyst test server
(site_server.pl) for each user, and use Apache to proxy from
user.test.site.com to the appropriate local port for that user. [1]

I'm hoping to go one farther, though, and allow the users home
directory on the development server to be exported to their local
machine by NFS or Samba.  I'm hoping that they can then do an svn
checkout to their local machine, edit changes on that machine, but
have those changes be reflected live via their personal test site. [2]

In summary: (all names are descriptive rather than real)
  test.site.com: development site updated automatically post-commit.
  live.site.com: user facing site updated as desired when test is stable.
  user1.test.site.com: proxied by Apache to site_server.pl:3001 in ~user1
  user2.test.site.com: proxied by Apache to site_server.pl:3002 in ~user2
  user3...
Where ~user* on server are NFS or Samba exported to client.

Does this seem reasonable?

Nathan Kurz
nate at verse.com

[1] Is there any reasonable way to do this with FastCGI instead so
that the server is respawned as necessary?  Or are users going to need
to restart their site_server.pl by hand if it ever fails to start?

[2] I'm Windows ignorant: are there any good ways to support NFS
mounts by a Windows client, or do I need to support Samba exports too?
And am I right to think that MacOSX should have no problem with NFS?