Upgrade to OpenACS 5.9

Upgrades from earlier version than OpenACS 5.8 should read upgrade-oacs-5-8.

OpenACS 5.9 requires PostgreSQL 9.0 or newer and XOTcl 2.0 or newer (part of the nsf package). XOTcl 2.0 can be installed e.g. via install-ns, or from Debian sid https://packages.debian.org/sid/, or from sources https://next-scripting.org/. In order to check the versions of these packages already installed in your OpenACS installation, check the output of /xotcl/version-numbers in your installation.

Before upgrading to OpenACS 5.9, upgrade all packages in your current installation to recent versions in your OpenACS 5.8 installation (i.e. in the oacs-5-8 channel, especially if you are using edit-this-page, which has bugs in its data model that can complicate the oacs-5-9 installation).

In general it is always recommended to backup your current installation before overwriting it. Make e.g. a tar archive of all files of the OpenACS tree and a database dump.

After upgrading the packages in the oacs-5-8 channel,  the following steps are recommended:

• Restart the server with OpenACS 5.8
• Install newest version of the source files (e.g. from the OpenACS 5.9 tar distributions, or install/upgrade from the oacs-5-9 branch from cvs),
• Upgrade the acs-core packages via package manager, restart server
• Upgrade/install application packages via package manager as needed (from file-system or from repository)

To upgrade from OpenACS 5.9.0 to OpenACS 5.9.1 it is recommended to upgrade via tar ball or via CVS. Upgrade from repository works for NaviServer, but leads to an error after the install steps with AOLserver (the installation is OK, after a restart, everything is OK).

Step by step upgrade from OpenACS 5.8 directly to OpenACS 5.9.1

The following steps assume, you have a plain, not modified version of OpenACS running.

1. Upgrade to the latest version of OpenACS 5.8, e.g. via
      cvs -r oacs-5-8 openacs-4
   Restart the server and make sure, you have upgrade all packages;
   under /acs-admin/apm/ you should see a Kernel like 5.8.3d2 running.
    
2. Get release tar file
   Get the tar file of openacs-5.9.1, unpack it (e.g. under /usr/local), copy content over your current installation
      cd openacs-4
      cp -r /usr/local/openacs-5.9.1/* .
   and restart server.
    
3. Upgrade packages:
   Browse to /acs-admin/install click on "upgrade from local", select all packages, restart server - done.

In case, you have a locally modified version of OpenACS, but you have not modified the kernel packages, then make sure to get the tar file of the core packages in step (2), proceed as described, upgrade the acs-core packages first and then the application packages of your installation.

In case you have in your installation as well changes in the acs-core packages (which is not recommended, but it happens), then get the diffs (you local changes) between the acs-core packages of oacs-5-8 and your installation, proceed as with the unmodified acs-core packages (paragraph above) and apply/merge your local changes after upgrading.

These steps are working also with recent versions of PostgreSQL such as 11.1.