Paper Proposal for RUC 2003

Title proposals

• The case for un-staging
• Staging considered harmful
• Aging Staging
• To Stage or Not to Stage
• No Fun on Stage

Presentation Objectives

Challenge the idea of staging being a "best practice". Reverse the perspective on configuration management, to focus primarily on derived objects.

Presentation Summary

We shall first review the concept of staging, and show some reasons commonly invoked to use it. Then we will make the case for unstaging: show that some common problems arise from the early decision to map configuration items to source elements, and from the resulting inflexibility.

Presentation Abstract

1. Reasons to stage
   • Safe storage (side-effect)
   • Visibility through replication (side-effect)
   • Performance: poor winking, multiple checking, collisions
   • Hiding
2. Cases for unstaging
   • Merging information from two elements (evil twins, and others): management of history
   • Split a file in two: different stability or access patterns
   • Same file as both an element and a derived object (generated template, hiding)
3. Promotion, sharing: avoid merging, chtype