Dealing with hot/bugfixes for application repository apps (without source control)

[Max Nowak]

Hi,

I'd like to know how you people handle deploying bugfixes (or hotfixes) for custom applications that use the application repository, but are not connected to a version control system like Git.

This problem always comes up when a bug is reported in prod. I fix the bug on dev, and increment the version of the app. Since the development is ongoing, dev and test instances are already on a newer version than prod, with features that might not be production-ready.

To get the hot/bugfix on prod, I usually do one of the following:

- Deploy the newest version on prod, after evaluating the consequences of doing so
- Disable new features in dev (if possible), create a new version, and deploy that on prod
- Manually replay my fixes on prod and deal with the upgrade conflicts later

- Use XML ex/import to move fixes between instances

None of those feel particularly good, safe, or efficient, though. Is there any alternative that I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Max

[Mark Manders]

You could push your fixes to the app and deploy the app as a new version when new functionality is ready to be deployed and the bug fix itself can be moved via update sets.