improve publishing of component sites using composite metadata so that content doesn't vanish and break downstream jobs

(2011-04-01 10:11:04) nickboldt: and while I'd love to do:
(2011-04-01 10:11:12) nickboldt: mkdir whatever-new
(2011-04-01 10:11:22) nickboldt: rsync newstuff whatever-new
(2011-04-01 10:11:25) nickboldt: rm -fr whatever
(2011-04-01 10:11:29) nickboldt: mv whatever-new whatever
(2011-04-01 10:11:43) nickboldt: so that the time between "it's there" and "it's there and updated" is less
(2011-04-01 10:11:52) nickboldt: I CANNOT with the current infra we have
(2011-04-01 10:12:03) nickboldt: instead I can do an rsync --delete and push into the same folder on top
(2011-04-01 10:12:16) nickboldt: but that means that the metadata will oft be out of whack w.r.t the site content
(2011-04-01 10:12:17) maxandersen: hmmm

(2011-04-01 10:12:41) nickboldt: if you can think of a way to do a "push then rename" instead of "push into existing and clean out cruft"

(2011-04-01 10:12:51) nickboldt: over sftp via a script (non-interactive) then I'm all ears
(2011-04-01 10:13:26) nickboldt: I can't push a script there and run it, or simply connect over ssh and run a script directly
(2011-04-01 10:13:35) maxandersen: well what I was thinking was to do a push of new site into new dir, push site.xml/compositewhatever pointing to new dir and then rsync delete the existing one..
(2011-04-01 10:14:10) maxandersen: sftp rm should work?
(2011-04-01 10:14:13) nickboldt: MIGHT be able to do sftp delete
(2011-04-01 10:14:39) maxandersen: if you control it with a composite artifact you dont need to rename anything
(2011-04-01 10:14:51) maxandersen: except the content pointer in there which you know "locally"
(2011-04-01 10:15:01) nickboldt: true... so I'd need a tool to do a one line swap in the composite*.xml files
(2011-04-01 10:15:13) nickboldt: remove ref to old site, replace w/ ref to new site
(2011-04-01 10:15:17) nickboldt: and then delete the old one

1. generate composite metadata files on the fly
2. publish that into root dir, all/repo/
3. purge previous build's folder over scripted sftp?