dereine reports that many people using Views and trying to upgrade from one version to another of Views are following the procedure in UPGRADE.txt (which is meant to be a procedure for updating from one major version of Drupal to another, not a procedure for upgrading versions of modules). The problem is that users are doing this process (as it says to do in this file): maintainance-mode, disable-module, update-module-code, run update.php, enable module -- which according to dereine "can break a LOT of stuff, for example remove existing block-configurations".

The d7 version of UPGRADE.txt was heavily edited to make this distinction clear. The D6 version needs a similar clarification, or at least some text at the top to make the distinction clear and point the user to http://drupal.org/upgrade ... although I don't think we actually have documentation there for how to update a contrib module or theme from one version to another. That needs to be added.

Sigh.

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#2 1334774-upgrade-description.patch4.98 KBdawehner

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jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
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There's a page in the support forums about updating modules that we can probably grab/adapt (haven't read it through but it seems to be the only docs we have currently):
http://drupal.org/node/672472

dawehner’s picture

dawehner
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commented
Status: Active » Needs review
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new 1334774-upgrade-description.patch4.98 KB

A more detailed explanation why this method is bad comes here:
Let's assume the module which implements hook_block is disabled but _block_rehash() is runned you will
have these blocks as part of the $old_blocks and drupal does the following:

  // Remove blocks that are no longer defined by the code from the database.
  foreach ($old_blocks as $module => $old_module_blocks) {
    foreach ($old_module_blocks as $delta => $block) {
      db_query("DELETE FROM {blocks} WHERE module = '%s' AND delta = '%s' AND theme = '%s'", $module, $delta, $theme);
    }
  }

Here is a first patch for the upgrade.txt, this probably needs some work.

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
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commented

This looks pretty reasonable to me (I think it mostly came from the D7 file, right?).

I think we should change the heading for the UPGRADES section to say MAJOR VERSION UPGRADES though, and we probably also need to edit that section to refer to the "first steps" section above, to avoid duplication of the instructions there (e.g., back up your database).

There are also a couple of minor line-wrapping issues, like:

+2. Go to Administer > Site configuration > Site maintenance.
+   Disable the "Site status" checkbox and save the
+   configuration.

"configuration" can be moved up onto the previous line.

There's still nothing in there about upgrading contrib modules, but I guess the d7 file doesn't either. We probably decided not to include that information because It's Not Core or something. In which case we should definitely add a page to the http://drupal.org/upgrade section about this!

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
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commented
Status: Needs review » Needs work

had forgotten to change the status

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
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commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Needs work » Closed (won't fix)

I am cleaning up old 6.x documentation issues. At this point, we are not spending effort fixing them. Sorry.