Forum OpenACS Q&A: Upgrading 5.0.4 -> 5.3 ?

I have a dotlrn site running openACS 5.0.4/dotLRN 2.0.3.

I would really like to get up to running something like the latest release. I've tried the directions here: https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-5-1/upgrade-openacs-files.html and https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-5-1/upgrade-5-0-dot.html, using the 5.2.3 tarball I've failed to get it working. (Non-cvs site, so I was copying files over.) Copying the files over the existing files (which I think is what the directions say to do?) doesn't seem to work. I can't even get to the install page if I do so (error message everywhere, missing procs, etc). I guess there've been too many changes?

Any suggestions for how to do this upgrade? Do I need a 5.1 tarball for an intermediate step? (If so, where do I get one? I don't see one available to download.)

An alternative to actually doing a real upgrade might be something like:

-- dump out custom data (thousands of algorithmic homework problems), categories, and relevant acs_objects.
-- download tarballs of all file-storage contents.
--Install vanilla latest and greatest, add custom tables for the thousands of homework problems.
-- Load custom data, resetting acs_object_id_seq afterwards
-- Load tarballs back into file storage

Would that work? It seems like the data I want to preserve involves few enough tables that I -might- be able to make it work, but surely there are upgrade scripts already that can do an upgrade from 5.0.x to 5.3.x, and I just am doing something wrong?

Thanks!

I'm trying to do an incremental upgrade, using a 5.1.1 tarball. (Aside: I don't see a 5.1.x tarball available in the downloads section - this is one I had "laying about".)

(Excuse the long post. I figure either I'll show someone else how to solve the problem, or else maybe it'll help someone to help me!)

chem_new is my openacs instance, so I did:

cp -rf openacs-5.1.1/* chem_new
(after moving the etc/ folder so that my configuration settings wouldn't get overwritten)

I can see the front page of the site, but attempting to go to /acs-admin gets me:

can't read "node_url": no such variable
while executing
"set admin_url "${node_url}admin/""
("uplevel" body line 2)
invoked from within
"uplevel 1 $code_block "
("1" arm line 1)
invoked from within
(etc etc)

So I got clever and went directly to /acs-admin/install/, which did serve up a page.

I chose "upgrade from local" and got:

Invalid switch: "-unclobber"
while executing
"template::multirow__arg_parser"
(procedure "multirow" line 1)
invoked from within
"multirow -unclobber foreach packages {
set install_url [export_vars -base install-2 { package_key repository_url }]
}"

Ok, so the unclobber switch must be new in 5.1. So I went to /acs-admin/apm/ and reloaded acs-templating.

Then I got
unknown command "subsite_id": (etc)
when I tried to do "upgrade from local".

I thought I might reload some other procs to fix it, but at that point, the acs-admin/apm page was also broken (same subsite_id message)

So I restarted the server. Based on error log spam, tcl procs loaded OK.

After restart, the acs-admin page opened up fine. I went to "upgrade from local file system", got a list of applications, checked them all, clicked the "install checked applications" button, and nothing happened. I tried with both Firefox and IE, nothing. Firefox says: "acs_ListBulkActionClick is not defined"

Any thoughts, anyone?