Opinions on upgrade process

[Sam Lawrance]

On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 15:38 +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> I'm maintainer for deskutils/sugarcrm, which is a pretty cute CRM
> application.  At the moment, the version in the ports is 2.5.1, which is
> relatively old, and it needs to be upgraded.
> 
> Sugar's position on upgrading appears to be that they will only support
> upgrading from one specific version to another.  So, while sugarcrm
> 3.5.0 has now been released, the only way to upgrade your installation
> from 2.5.1 is to go 2.5.1 -> 3.0.0 -> 3.0.1x -> 3.5.0.  If you don't do
> these upgrades in this exact order, you lose your entire customer
> database.
> 
> So this means that unless each upgrade is committed to the ports tree,
> users are not going to be able to upgrade cleanly from one version to
> the next using the freebsd ports collection.  On the other hand, Sugar
> are pumping out new versions of their product on average every 4 weeks,
> which means that people must track the ports collection carefully or
> else use date tags to update their ports tree to very specific times so
> that they can get the right version.
> 
> The upgrade process looks non trivial in the code - not impossible, but
> certainly non trivial.
> 
> Is there any precedent for dealing with this?  I.e. install random
> versions in the ports and explicitly don't support upgrade?  Sugar don't
> seem to be particularly responsive to emails (possibly because dealing
> with upgrades is hard), so they haven't come back with suggestion on how
> to implement an arbitrary upgrade path.
> 
> any suggestions?

That's quite a failing on the part of sugarcrm.  Even if you go to the
trouble of creating an extra two port versions to keep the upgrade path,
upgrading would still be ridiculous hassle.

IMO the best course of action would be to just bring in 3.5.0 and warn
about the incompatibility.  If there are problems, people need to raise
the issue with sugarcrm so it gets handled.