We're a small software company with only one product - an web site (8 million visits per month) that is load balanced (around 20 servers for web serving).
At the moment we do weekly releases, aiming towards continuous deployment.
Our servers are runnning Centos, our clients Mac OS X.
We're currently evaluating different packaging systems:
- RPM
- subversion + some shell scripting (creating a "production-svn-tree" separate from the source code tree)
- our self-made "packager" that consists of tar-archive plus some scripting - current problem is that there's no logic for downgrading (installing a non-current version), and no possibility to delete files - IMO adding those things includes quite a bit of work
I wonder if some of you have experience with using packaging systems for deployments and could give some insights.