Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Naviserver upgrade issue on RHEL 7.9

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8: Re: Naviserver upgrade issue on RHEL 7.9 (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Steigman on 12/17/25 06:48 PM
Making progress on our upgrade. One issue I wanted to run by you Gustaf relates to the upgrade logic for xowiki. We're at v0.89 from 5.8 days. Our xotcl core is at 0.126 and we're upgrading to Naviserver 5 with Nsf 2.4.

The Tcl upgrade logic has a lot of these types of upgrades:

::$package_id import-prototype-page "page-type"

Ours is failing at the first version upgrade that includes an invocation of this method - 0.96.

::11675808: unable to dispatch method 'import-prototype-page'
while executing
"error "[self]: unable to dispatch method '$m'""

Hoping you can point us in the right direction on this.

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9: Re: Naviserver upgrade issue on RHEL 7.9 (response to 8)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 12/31/25 05:39 PM

Hi Michael,

I did a bit of software archaeology, and the issue seems to be rooted in a very old upgrade path.

Some relevant points:

Regarding the upgrade path: The correct way to upgrade from OpenACS 5.4 to 5.10 is to go step by step through the intermediate releases:

5.4 → 5.5 → 5.6 → 5.7 → 5.8 → 5.9 → 5.10

If these steps are skipped, upgrade scripts will run in an environment that lacks the expected set of functions and APIs for that release. In that case, it’s not surprising that functions like this one fail - and it’s quite likely that additional issues will surface as well.

That said, I’ve added backward-compatibility procedures for the www-* methods to both the HEAD and oacs-5-10 branches. If you refresh your checkout, thes procs might ease your upgrade, but it should be seen as a temporary aid rather than a substitute for a proper staged upgrade.

Best regards,
Gustaf