22 Sep
2018
22 Sep
'18
9:44 a.m.
One more point on this investigation:
5) Remove the need to merge configuration files and make sure the user shouldn’t need to
edit anything in the WAR itself. See
https://forum.xwiki.org/t/managing-configuration-changes-when-upgrading-xwi…
and https://markmail.org/message/6cvm5hocvtbqtgp6 (there’s a more recent discussion
thread, need to find it).
This point is important and a pain when you upgrade. This would be a good candidate IMO to
improve xwiki’s upgradability and we could implement it sooner than later (knowing that
we’ve been wanting to have that fore years now ;)).
Thanks
-Vincent
On 21 Sep 2018, at 16:19, Vincent Massol
<vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Thanks Caty.
See below
On 21 Sep 2018, at 15:56, Ecaterina Moraru
(Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi devs,
I've heard that the upgrade process is a complicated process and relies on
a lot of manual operations. I haven't investigated the technical solutions
we have at our disposal, but I tried to image the desired UI an
Administrator would want when upgrading:
* be notified that a new version is available:
https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Proposal/Upgrade/SimplerUpgrade…
* have an upgrade section in Administration where Distribution and
Extensions can be checked for new versions and upgraded / backed:
https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Proposal/Upgrade/SimplerUpgrade…
https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Proposal/Upgrade/SimplerUpgrade…
A more detailed proposal at
https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/Upgrade/SimplerUpgrade/
So, what are your thoughts on this?
Some thoughts:
1) Automatic distribution upgrade would be very nice but it’s hard to do for all
packagings. We already do it for the debian one (apt-get upgrade) and we could do it
better for some others (docker, standalone). However for the manual WAR install it’s
harder and I don’t even know if it’s possible (at least for all supported servlet
containers). One idea would be to implement it for Tomcat only for example and have a way
to control the tomcat manager (manager app) to perform the upgrade of the webapp.
1a) Would be nice to have a a distribution upgrade UI too for merging the various
configuration files (could be a separate webapp for ex - haven’t really thought about
this).
1b) For the docker upgrade we can look at the discourse upgrade process, to see if there
are some good ideas to reuse
2) We have comments about the DW being hard to understand/complex. You haven’t addressed
this. Is it because you didn’t find anything to improve?
3) We regularly see users having problems to upgrade (cf forum, irc, mailing lists) and
we’d need to list the common issues they have. Their problems may not be related to the UI
but to bugs/limitations we currently have.
4) A typical known issue is when the user skips/clicks “never” on the DW. He cannot get
it to appear afterwards. We will need to fix this usability issue for ex.
Thanks
-Vincent
>
> Thanks,
> Caty 
