RE: [Pyds-dev] Upgrading to PyDS 0.7 on Windows

Hi!

> I want to upgrade to 0.7. I installed 0.6.3 using the 
> packaged windows installer from Luis. I run WinXP.
> 
> I am comfortable upgrading from source, but am wondering if 
> you can provide some clues to help?

How about using the packaged installer from Louis for PyDS 0.7.0? ;-)

> I have read the Install from Source directions at the PyDS 
> blog and the Win32 install clues at 
> http://www.pycs.net/users/0000077/stories/1.html. I do not 
> see any help specific to upgrading existing installs.

As I understand it, upgrades with Windows are much like ugrades on Unix:
just install the new version. Only you don't need the full twist, only the
stuff needed for PyDS itself (as the infrastructure is already in place).
Louis has done different packages, one base package with the full install
and upgrade packages that just carry the PyDS stuff.

> Also, does 0.7 require upgrades to any of the underlying 
> dependencies (e.g., mk4py?) I assume I would need to do those 
> too - how can I easily identify what these are?

No, usually there are no dependencies on newer version. That's mostly to the
fact that we already use the newest versions of all dependencies ;-)

If there are special dependencies, I specifically announce them on the main
blog at http://pyds.muensterland.org/, but there were only very few
situations like this (there were special dependencies on a newer medusa
somewhere in the 0.6.x versions).

> I want to be sure I don't accidentally stomp on any of my 
> existing configuration, template customizations, data, etc.

Usually data and customizations shouldn't break on upgrades. There is only
one part that accesses data files, that's metakit. And metakit is quite
stable with regard to datafile format. The PyDS tools themselves do
initialize databases, but do automatically add or remove attributes as
needed. So if you upgrade, everything should work fine. If you accidentely
downgrade, most should work fine, too, but if there were some attributes
dropped in newer versions, their contents is lost.

Actually even with my weird hacking I only broke my data files once, and it
was a rather weird situation and only one datafile was broken (it was the
data file from the CalendarTool, one that can easily be rebuilt).

Upgrades can easily go over several releases (you might even be able to
upgrade a very old 0.2 version to 0.7 in one step), so usually there isn't
much to worry about when upgrading. I would backup datafiles to a different
path, just to be sure, maybe safe the old installation file somewhere to be
able to reinstall an older version with the safed datafiles if the new
version creates problems, but that are just usual jobs you should do on any
software upgrade anyway.

bye, Georg