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

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:

• xowiki version 0.89 was released about 17 years ago and belongs to the OpenACS 5.4 timeframe. See:
  https://github.com/openacs/xowiki/blame/488a6494c4cf976b11ed7198b4b8fa8dd0b485d8/xowiki.info

• OpenACS 5.4.3 itself was released in 2008. A proper upgrade at that time should already have advanced xowiki beyond this version.

• The procedure import-prototype-page was renamed to www-import-prototype-page almost exactly 10 years ago (Dec 23, 2015) in the oacs-5-9 branch:
  https://github.com/openacs/xowiki/commit/8bcc756b5a17d2407f9bcb5a6755cd955e3aa9a5

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