> You're a smart man and I enjoy your blog, so please don't take what I'm saying personally (I used language in my original comment that was too emotional).

Oh don't worry about that, I just wanted to hear your opinion.

> I would only recommend this if you had a separate server that acted similarly to a continuous integration server.

Yep, that's exactly the current setup. I should have included a disclaimer that said "only implement this if you're sure it won't break".

> If everything passes, then the CI server should bundle it up into a .deb and serve it on its own deb repository to the production servers.

This is how large-scale deployments should be done, I agree. My post (and the way I use this) is for single-server or two-server deployments for small projects, mainly in startups, where a full-blown provisioning server is overkill. It has worked very well there, but it does take some higher amount of responsibility.

For larger deployments, we're doing what you mentioned: Jenkins continually runs tests, packages the repo in a .deb if they pass, and triggers the deployment through a PPA to the corresponding servers.

I should update the post with rationale on which use cases this serves, I take that too much for granted sometimes. Thanks for the feedback!