Upgrading Drupal

Here's a bootstrap script I ran to get a raw site upgraded all the way from 4.7 to 5.5 - run from a drupal php-node! No FTP, No Shell, no control panel.

There are many many warnings that should be applied to this very dangerous script - I'll leave it up to you. there were two places where I really crossed my fingers and hoped...

It required that the permissions on the server were NOT locked down to read-only (as they really should be) but in this case they were not ... and it just worked.

Here's the process in full - I uncommented and commented the steps as I went. They all need to run one after another.

No way is this good code or good practice, but it's an interesting proof-of-concept.
Just posted FYI. Probably not a good idea to try this at home, but I used it when a client just gave me a site login and I didn't want to wake them up for the FTP password ;-)

<?php
# echo("Running as: ");
# passthru("whoami");
# passthru("ls -la ");
# Check if the top level dir is writable by you. 
# If so, we are OK

# ## Fetch distro ##
# passthru("wget  --output-document=download/drupal-5.5.tar.gz http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.5.tar.gz ");

# unpack distro
# passthru(" tar -xzf download/drupal-5.5.tar.gz");
# passthru("ls -la drupal-5.5");

# ## Modify connection string ##

# passthru("cat sites/default/settings.php");

Can anyone help? I've been trying to update from 4.6.3 => 4.7.10, then eventually to 5.

When I run the update script, I see, "The update process was aborted prematurely while running update #147 in system.module. All other errors have been logged. You may need to check the watchdog database table manually."

When I look in the update script for references to #147, I see:
<...>

 // The following three updates were made on the 4.6 branch
      '2005-04-14' => 128, '2005-05-06' => 128, '2005-05-07' => 128,
      '2005-04-08: first update since Drupal 4.6.0 release' => 129,
      '2005-04-10' => 130, '2005-04-11' => 131, '2005-04-14' => 132,
      '2005-04-24' => 133, '2005-04-30' => 134, '2005-05-06' => 135,
      '2005-05-08' => 136, '2005-05-09' => 137, '2005-05-10' => 138,
      '2005-05-11' => 139, '2005-05-12' => 140, '2005-05-22' => 141,
      '2005-07-29' => 142, '2005-07-30' => 143, '2005-08-08' => 144,
      '2005-08-15' => 145, '2005-08-25' => 146, '2005-09-07' => 147,
      '2005-09-18' => 148, '2005-09-27' => 149, '2005-10-15' => 150,
      '2005-10-23' => 151, '2005-10-28' => 152, '2005-11-03' => 153,
      '2005-11-14' => 154, '2005-11-27' => 155, '2005-12-03' => 156,
    );
<...>

When I click on the "log" link I get a blank screen. Ditto when I click on the main page URL or any URL for the site for that matter.

The complete, thorough upgrading procedure takes too much time and requires too much fiddling, particularly since a major upgrade to 6.0 is just around the corner, and I wouldn't worry about a few leftover file corpses, etc. I need a shortcut.

I've done the full procedure several times now, from 5.0 step by step to 5.3, but it may not be worth the trouble. My first idea would be to

Hi,

I'm new to Drupal and my first assignment is to upgrade a site built with v5.2. Upgrade went fine, no errors. But now I'm having a problem where I have to include "?q=node" in the url or else my front page content says "Page not found" and all the blocks seem empty. This is probably a simple problem but aside from checking that things are 'promoted to front page' I'm not sure where to look!

Thanks,
jesse

In the upgrade tutorial, on the Site Preparation page (http://drupal.org/upgrade/preparing-the-site), the third step is "Turn off all modules that are not core modules". Are core-optional modules understood to be included as core modules for this purpose? Should the core-optional modules be left enabled when upgrading/updating?

Why is Drupal such a hassle to upgrade, with all the security updates which pop up it seems like I need to upgrade every month.
Has anyone build an automatic update script which will download, backup and install the updates?
Nik