What I see here is that it is not as easy to create an upgrade system for this kind of project. Perhaps the nature of it, it's a good reason. Remember that Ofbiz is an ERP system and tries to cover as much as it can different businesses, so IMO it's not like a proprietary product or another kind of open source project where it is not a common practice to change the trunk code by everyone and also allows to easily install plugins, mods, extensions, etc.
IMO, I can say that one good chance to achieve this is to separate the framework from the apps, already discussed in a lot of posts and I think it is strongly accepted by the community. This will get the ability to extract an important piece of code which I think is not regularly altered, at least in my case, I've modified some apps but never the framework. >From my point of view, the hot-deploy works fine and it's fairly enough for a lot of customization purposes and maintain the trunk code untouched. But it seems to me that sometimes is not enough mostly when an adaptation of an existing app, concretely i18n enters the scene. For example I found to be very complicated to move the entire Accounting module, IMO the one that requires more i18n, since it is related with a lot of modules. In this case I have had to customize in-place. I have some ideas about that, but I prefer to discuss this in a proper post. BJ, I believe that your problem is related with the number of installations do you have/maintain so a little solution may be (if you aren't doing yet) the vendor drop technique ( http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.advanced.vendorbr.html). But I suppose it's only valid if you decided to use the trunk version from the beginning and kept up to date so often... On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Jacques Le Roux < jacques.le.r...@les7arts.com> wrote: > From: "Adam Heath" <doo...@brainfood.com> > > On 09/22/2010 03:33 PM, BJ Freeman wrote: >> >>> Am it to gather by this that you can do a direct SVN update and all your >>> customization continue to work? >>> say from 9.04 to 10.04 >>> >> >> Ofbiz has never supported upgrades. I agree with BJ here. >> >> Database tables can change. Not all changes are automatic. Such changes >> are not listed in a simple place(in the source). >> >> Values in tables can change. No upgrade conversions are provided(again, >> in a simple place). >> > > Is this useless? > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBTECH/Revisions+Requiring+Data+Migration > > Jacques > > > To solve this, requires running older ofbiz on older database, doing a >> test upgrade to each and every new version, and then seeing what is >> different. This is a *very* hard problem, not easy to automate, and takes >> smart people lots of time. This is not something you can just force on the >> community. No one has sat down to do this very busy, hard work, so it >> hasn't yet been done. >> >> If you run trunk, then it is up to you to solve any per-version upgrade >> problems. >> >> However, official releases should really have appropriate, detailed, >> upgrade instructions. >> >> > -- ----- Jonatan Soto
