Opinions on upgrade process

[Nick Hilliard]

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?

Nick