On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Ryan Davis ryan@acceleration.net wrote:
We do something like this. For lisp websites my company makes, we have a password-protected admin section with some light UI to help us manage the site (turn logging levels up/down, clear caches, etc), and one of those tools is a "evaluate this code in the running lisp" textarea, with a dropdown to select what package it runs in. This is very rarely used to patch the site in emergency situations or for trivial changes where we don't want to bring down the site. This has bit us a few times, where we fixed a small bug directly in the running lisp and then forgot to publish the new code and had mystery regressions when the lisp process was restarted.
A really funny cautionary tale about this sort of thing:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Designed-For-Reliability.aspx
-- Scott