I have just arrived at a new client site and was handed a pile of MediaWiki wikis, running varied versions from 1.3.5+enotif v1.2, 1.4.0, 1.4.4, and 1.4.7 (I think that's all of them). I'm looking at an upgrade to current (1.9.3, 1.10 if it comes out in timeframe) versions.
I've done some version upgrades before, but never from such old versions. What risks, known gotchas, or issues am I facing here? Should this be expected to work cleanly, do I have a major problem, somewhere in between?
Thanks.
On 4/24/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I have just arrived at a new client site and was handed a pile of MediaWiki wikis, running varied versions from 1.3.5+enotif v1.2, 1.4.0, 1.4.4, and 1.4.7 (I think that's all of them). I'm looking at an upgrade to current (1.9.3, 1.10 if it comes out in timeframe) versions.
I've done some version upgrades before, but never from such old versions. What risks, known gotchas, or issues am I facing here? Should this be expected to work cleanly, do I have a major problem, somewhere in between?
Issues do sometimes crop up with upgrades. I'd suggest making a database backup and trying an upgrade straight to 1.9.3 (or waiting a few weeks for 1.10 to be released). If that doesn't work, try rolling back and doing an incremental update to each newest version. (1.x -> 1.x+1 is the most common use case and so is probably the most likely to work.) Make sure, obviously, that you meet the system requirements of the target version.
Simetrical wrote:
On 4/24/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I have just arrived at a new client site and was handed a pile of MediaWiki wikis, running varied versions from 1.3.5+enotif v1.2, 1.4.0, 1.4.4, and 1.4.7 (I think that's all of them). I'm looking at an upgrade to current (1.9.3, 1.10 if it comes out in timeframe) versions.
I've done some version upgrades before, but never from such old versions. What risks, known gotchas, or issues am I facing here? Should this be expected to work cleanly, do I have a major problem, somewhere in between?
Issues do sometimes crop up with upgrades. I'd suggest making a database backup and trying an upgrade straight to 1.9.3 (or waiting a few weeks for 1.10 to be released). If that doesn't work, try rolling back and doing an incremental update to each newest version. (1.x -> 1.x+1 is the most common use case and so is probably the most likely to work.) Make sure, obviously, that you meet the system requirements of the target version.
I agree with everything Simetrical said. Also, I would note that the step mostly likely to cause trouble is the upgrade from a pre-1.5 wiki to 1.5 or greater, since the schema changed significantly and support for character sets other than UTF-8 was dropped. Read the UPGRADE file in the 1.9 tarball -- it has upgrade notes for versions all the way back to prehistory.
-- Tim Starling
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