Comment by bell-cot
4 years ago
Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line / formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.
That process even has a name: "Copy Exactly!"
> The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process control systems, and joint Fab management structures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!
And here us software developers are still trying to do this and think we're the smartest people in the room for inventing it!
Back in the days of "classic" ASP pages, the usual model at the shop I worked in was that whenever we needed to add a page to the site we would copy a working page and then modify it. Sure it duplicated a lot of common code, but it wasn't without its advantages. You could be pretty certain that your page would not break anything else, and that later changes to a page would also be self-contained. It did suck when a change needed to be made to many pages, but if you knew about cygwin and grep, sed, and awk, those could often be automated.
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sometimes called copy stupid in extreme circumstances
See: Target's botched move into Canada. They basically copied everything they did in the US. This was compounded by an optimistic purchase of another company's locations to expand into. They bombed the project's runway on that and couldn't afford to keep it going while they sorted out all the problems resulting from Canada revealing all the flaws in their US systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Canada
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That general philosophy seems to be intact. A very recent example: a large machine at their Hillsboro research facility was dismantled and sent to production in Ireland, with the same model with a very slight upgrade shipped in to replace it at the R&D location.
Ignore the red herring title: https://semianalysis.com/is-intel-shipping-tools-out-of-us-f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!
Docker for factories.
the original reproducible build in a way