[Pmwiki-users] Re: Migration plans (was: v2 advanced tables direction)

chr@home.se chr
Sun Oct 3 19:24:34 CDT 2004


On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> > * For my wiki.lyx.org, someone is bound to ask me *why* the syntax has
> >   been changed... some ready made motivations would be nice :-)
...
> The new link syntax is much simpler -- always use [[...]] for a link,
> and everything in [[...]] is a link of some sort.  Directives are always
> [:something:], variable substitutions are {$Name}.

That's a very good motivation, once I've upgraded I'll probably use 
your motivation verbatim :-)

> > Apprehensions and worries:
> > * For my work wiki, I'm primarily worried that it'll stop working or that
> >   I might loose information. 
> 
> Well, one of the upgrade paths allows you to prototype and test v2.0 on 
> your existing wiki content pages without having to disturb the existing
> wiki or risk the pages.  Thus you can find out what does and doesn't 
> work before committing to an upgrade.

This kind of scheme is probably a good idea to always use, instead of just
overwriting the current installation with a new version. For wiki.lyx.org,
I've actually still got 0.5.27 version of PmWiki running that accesses the
same pages.  (I think some CSS in 1.x wasn't appreciated by some old
version of Netscape).

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that we should probably make this
kind of 'beta testing with fallback option' a standard part of the upgrade
path. Maybe the process could be described like this:

# The wiki uses version 2.x, accessed through the normal URI
# The admin installs 2.x.1 in parallel, accessed through some "beta-URI"
# After testing, the normal URI gives you 2.x.1, and "old-URI" gives 2.x

An alternative to using different URIs would be to give a parameter, e.g.
	pmwiki-version=beta

I don't know... maybe the scheme above is over the top, but I have felt a
bit worried that something will break each time I upgrade to a later
version. So it would definitely be nice if there was a systematic way of
letting people access the site using a previous working version. Actually,
I just checked and wiki.lyx.org is still running 0.6.15 because I haven't
felt the time/risk motivated the benefits.

If this is intersting to discuss further, maybe we should start a new 
thread on the topic?

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr





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