It's largely a matter of

Tom — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:22:19 -0700

It's largely a matter of convenience. If a project we're working on requires that sort of precise environmental control, we'll do that. Drupal's relatively insensitive about its environment, though (or historically has been, anyway). And it's not unusual for us to be doing work outside of the office. This setup makes working offline as simple as doing a SQL dump & local import, then changing a line in settings.php.

Partly this is a legacy of earlier versions of Drupal, when more of a site existed in the filesystem versus in the database -- it used to be perfectly normal to run both the webserver and database locally. With Drupal 5 that doesn't work as well.

But mostly it's just that what you describe is overkill. Of course, if we more frequently had multiple devs working on the same code simultaneously, things would be different. And I'm sure that we may someday bother with a full-fledged VPN solution that provides on-the-road access to the sort of environment you're describing. But for right now it's not worth the setup time.

Why are you developing on

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:22:01 -0700

Why are you developing on several disparate machines with a central database instead of developing on a development server with numerous sandboxes. Sandboxes in a stable dev environment keeps everything the same for each developer. PHP version, extensions, apache, etc.

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It's largely a matter of

Why are you developing on