[Pkg-drupal-devel] Status and plans

[Conrad Shultz]

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Neil McGovern wrote:

> 2. Upgrade paths
> This is fairly interesting in Drupal's case. For more info on this, and
> generally, see http://drupal.org/node/65922
> So, I'm going to take the previous maintainer's advice:
>   Create separate versions for major upstream releases: drupal4.5,
>   drupal4.6, drupal4.7.  Don't waste time trying to do automatic
>   database updates -- that Simply Won't Work.

I disagree about the database updates.  Our company uses Drupal on
Debian for both our ecommerce system (a _very_ heavily modified Drupal)
and website (a slightly modified Drupal).

We started on Drupal 4.4 when that was the version in "testing",
upgraded to 4.5, and have since moved to a non-packaged 4.6.  In all
cases we had to do database updates and, while the Drupal upgrader was
fundamentally broken, I was able to write my own upgrade shell script
that took care of the database upgrades.

Complexity seems to derive from two sources:

1) Drupal supports MySQL and Postgresql, which implement SQL differently
and thus require handholding for upgrades (especially postgres, which
lacks the "ALTER TABLE" command).

2) Databases need not be locally hosted (in serious environments, they
won't be), leading to need for additional checking before jumping into
an automatic upgrade.

Neither is insurmountable, and honestly we shouldn't make users have to
jump through the hoops that I did in order to do a version upgrade.

I would be happy to share upgrade work I have done if it would be
helpful for the package maintainers.

- --
Conrad Shultz
cshultz at gene-tools.com
Special Projects
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