=head1 Design Objectives

=over 4

=item Use configuration not auto-detection

One problem with the ancestor of C<git-deploy> was that in a misguided attempt to
make things easier it attempted to do a lot of auto-detection. In hindsight
this was almost definitely counter productive.  It neither made it easier for
the users, nor for the developers. C<git-deploy> should avoid this mistake
and use explicit configuration for everything it does .

=item Delegate and not implement

C<git-deploy> is intended to I<manage> the rollout process, not to actually
be responsible for every action. An example would be the process of copying the
tree to another host, which will always be the responsibility of a some other
tool, although may/will be managed by C<git-deploy>

The part of the job that C<git-deploy> should implement is anything involving
most aspects of managing git, interacting with the user, configuration, 
providing locks and logging, etc. Everything else should be delegated. 

So for instance a check that the git tree does not contain unpushed commits is 
something that C<git-deploy> should know how to do, but it should not directly 
know how to restart a webserver. It is ok if the C<git-deploy> package provides 
ready made hooks that do things like this, which the user can then configure to
be used, but they should never be part of the core behaviour of C<git-deploy> 
itself.

=item Always design for the complex case

In general C<git-deploy> is intended for managing rolling out many servers
in a multi-step process that involves some level of user management. While
it does provide tools for simpler scenarios, any feature it implements should
generally "fit" into that general process.

=item Every rolled out commit should be reachable from the primary branch.

In general git-deploy is  designed with the premise that we should always
be able to "reach" a rolled out commit from git via git-log. It is possible
that this is too restrictive and that it needs to be reconsidered, but it
does make life easier as a dev.

=back 4


