[URGENT] Development environment mustn't depend on production database

[dhexus]

Hi Warren, making development environment dependent on production components is a design issue. It's not a good idea to use production db because:

• we'll have write operations to db and there should never be the risk to break production environment by mistakes that happen in a development environment
• we cannot continue to develop in an offline setting, for instance I cannot run FIT now (or work on the train, whatever...)
• it's hard to play with data structures as we cannot make any changes to production and it could be impossible to set up a dedicated test instance including data in case we need it quickly

Solution:

• We could use a settings file that gets replaced during release process by a production version
• Create test database for testing automatically and use mock data

[warren-oneill]

Actually you told me last week that you wouldn't be working this week and that I could go ahead and commit into master. It's not my fault you have an outdated DB and I not going to keep master outdated just because you won't update your DB.

[warren-oneill]

this is only currently a problem because the views have changed a number of times. Once things stabilize this shouldn't be an issue.

[warren-oneill]

it will update your views