Upgrading appears too difficult?

I'm wondering if it's not an indication that maintaining an up to date Foswiki is still to difficult when:

• Download.DownloadFoswiki says, "These special releases will be updated to 1.1.3 during the first weeks after the official release"
  • Yet 5 of the 6 "Other current version installers" listed are not up to date (versions 1.1.2, 1.0.9, and 1.0.10-3) after 4 and a half months?

It's unfortunate it cannot be installed and updated as simply as many of the other Wiki's (Tiki Wiki, MediaWiki, Wikka Wiki, Doku Wiki, PmWiki) via SimpleScripts in CPanel in many hosting environments, and that it can't be updated with internal tools, ala WordPress, et al.

-- CraigBowers - 01 Sep 2011

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This brings me back - I re-sorted the download categories on that page ages ago not long after the fork. I'm wondering now if the wording for that section was unfortunate, as it was never really a block for "officially supported downloads" - at the time it just so happened that we had a few alternatives that were up to date. Since then I expect some have stopped being maintained, while others have been added, making the section look sort of odd with the disclaimer that all the different packages will be updated within the few first weeks of a new release.

Honestly that section should probably be merged with the "Other release packages" section, and the disclaimer clarified, as they're all alternative downloads that may or may not actively be maintained by somebody. Unless we can get volunteers to maintain a series of alternate downloads, anyway

All in all I would not suggest that the state of the download page accurately indicates anything about the difficulty level of an upgrade (more appropriately the attention and time availability of alternative download providers) - however, as it stands it does sort of look bad. We should probably fix up the wording.

-- RasmusPraestholm - 01 Sep 2011

as I am the 'maintainer' of 3 of the packages, I'd like to just say that the windows installer and usb stick are lagging mostly because I don't personally use windows all that much - I have to re-install several virtual machines and set up dev environments - something that Microsoft and their stupid licensing tools makes painful enough that I havn't done it in months.

That, and I thought I'd uploaded a 1.1.3 windows installer package, so had totally forgotten to get to it

And yes, upgrading is not hard, it takes more time for me to create an environment to do it, and then another set to test. While I'm in zurich, I don't even have access to my normal set of servers and dvd's.

this 'simple scripts' thing you mention doesn't seem to have info on how to write one for them - is it some kind of closed source pointlessness? I could probably make one pretty quickly if there is docco - cos upgrading is rather easy:

1. unzip upgrade zip
2. run configure to save new settings.

or worst case

1. unzip and configure new full install
2. copy across your data and pub (leaving out System web, and looking at the distributed Main topics)
3. run configure... and reinstall plugins you had before.

our docco tries very hard to hand hold people through variations on this, but really....

on windows, the main thing to be careful of, is not to over-write the bin dir files, or to re-correct their perl path afterwards.

-- SvenDowideit - 01 Sep 2011