Forum OpenACS Q&A: Upgrade question.

1: Upgrade question.

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 11/19/09 12:00 AM

I have just one old heavily customised (hacked to bits in fact) 4.6.3 site running with PG7.2.4 on a server that I want to re-deploy. All my other sites now run against PG8.2. I would like to migrate the 4.6.3 site to the server running PG8.2.

One option would be to run both PG7.2.4 and PG8.2 on the target machine, but I would rather not if this can be avoided without too much difficulty.

I would like ideally to just run my (very stable) 4.6.3 code on PG 8.2, accepting that this will require some coding on my part.

Does anyone have any idea of the scale of this task? What problems would be expected and which changes in PostgreSQL between the 7.x release and the 8.x release caused problems with the OpenACS code?

What would be the "least work" way to do this?

Thanks
Richard

2: Re: Upgrade question. (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 11/19/09 12:21 AM

I don't know exactly, but you can find clues in the https://openacs.org/xowiki/openacs-compatibility-matrix

Pg 7.2 works to Openacs 4.6.3
Pg 7.4 works with Openacs 5.2
Pg 8.2 works with Openacs 5.3 to 5.5

It seems to be that you will want to look at the sql upgrade scripts in the core to find the changes needed to work with the db version shifts.

Depending on your code, it might be easier to upgrade the site to use Openacs 5.3 (using a test server) and re-introduce your custom code to it. This way, the site is fully upgraded to 5.3, and the custom code has migrated with it. Also, hopefully you will be able to extract the custom code into areas of the system that are fairly resilient to system changes during upgrades.

3: Re: Upgrade question. (response to 2)

Posted by Victor Guerra on 11/19/09 12:57 AM

Maybe it is also useful to take a look to the commits that are related to postgres, so you get an idea of what changes you need to apply somehow. Check this link that will give you all the commits that contain the words: postgres or PG on the comments section.

4: Re: Upgrade question. (response to 1)

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 11/19/09 08:19 AM

Thank you guys, that's very helpful. In fact, very few of my changes (if any) were to core code. Perhaps a couple of authentication code or RQ hacks but not much more than that. The bulk of my changes were to the ecommerce package.

I think I'll do as you suggest and start by upgrading OpenACS core. After doing that I can see what breaks and then fix it.

5: Re: Upgrade question. (response to 1)

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 11/19/09 08:21 AM

From the matrix it looks as if the best method is to upgrade core to 5.2 first, then migrate to PG8.2, and then upgrade to core 5.5.

Thanks very much.
R.