Dear DSpace developers and users,
As many of you know, the DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) (
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/cmtygp/DSpace+Community+Advisory+Team)<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/cmtygp/DSpace+Community+Advisory+Team>helps
review the JIRA issues classified as new feature requests. The goal
of the DCAT review is to help move the feature along – by helping to flesh
out requirements or ideas for implementation as well as recruiting
developers to work on the request. DCAT generally selects the new feature
requests which appear to be of broad interest in the community. DCAT
discussions are documented and are always open to the entire community for
comment/feedback (
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/dsforum/DCAT+Discussion+Forum). There
are some new feature requests that would be very useful to discuss with the
entire community on the mailing list rather than just in DCAT. We are
bringing one such request to you today: *Create easy upgrade scripts* (
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-456).
There is a general understanding within our community that any
simplification to the upgrade process would be greatly appreciated. Easy
upgrade scripts will be useful, in particular for institutions with few
resources in terms of technical staff time. Ideally one script could be
made that would enable going through the entire process responding to
various prompts for config information – i.e. so simple that a repository
manager may be able to do it. We suggest the following research approaches.
*Strategy 1*: We can start with further automation of the latest DSpace
upgrade instructions – a "suite of scripts" approach. For example, based on
the latest DSpace upgrade instructions: (
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC18/Upgrading+From+1.7.x+to+1.8.x)
the following could possibly be automated further:
- Diagnostic script that compares your DSpace installation with a
standard installation and highlights anything that is out of the ordinary
after which it can give you warnings if some upgrades won't work or might
cause difficulties.
- Creation of a full backup of DB, asset store, configurations and
customizations.
- Downloading a new DSpace version.
- Merging customizations.
- Build DSpace, stop tomcat, update DSpace.
- Update/Merge Dspaceconfigurations.
- Generate browse & search indexes – deploy webapp – restart servlet
container.
This kind of approach wouldn't automate the entire process, but could
simplify it considerably.
*Strategy 2:* Another approach could be through common configurations that
could provide an incentive driving users towards fewer configurations.
*Current activities*: the Agris (FAO) and Odin (UNESCO-IOC) communities are
currently investigating whether they can perform updates/upgrades using
their customized Windows-only (.exe) Installer for DSpace (AgriOcean – a
customized version of DSpace : for more information, go to
http://aims.fao.org/agriocean-dspace). Once it is built, this code may be
something that could be generalizable, at least for Windows-based
installations of DSpace (more detailed are here
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-456).
*Call for Feedback:* Do you know about any other similar projects? Has any
of you written or come across any easy upgrade scripts?
*Call for Volunteers:* If there are no solutions available yet, would any
of you volunteer to create easy upgrade scripts (e.g. 'dspace upgrade 1.7
1.8'), likely in Java? We can start writing scripts for the most common
database/operating system which in our case is PostgreSQL/Linux (based on
the numbers of users from DSpace Registry (
http://www.dspace.org/whos-using-dspace/Repository-List.html): Database:
PostgreSQL 310, MySQL 58, Oracle 40, Other 12; Operating System Platform:
Linux 224, Microsoft Windows 88, UNIX 28, Solaris 22, HPUX 2).
*Requirements*: Anyone (with the skills, expertise or experience) can
volunteer, you don't have to be a DSpace committer.
Thank you for your interest and input!
DCAT
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