Table of Contents
If working on a script to make an installation as complex as WACS work right was tough, imagine how much harder it is to upgrade an existing installation where you have no idea what has been changed and what hasn't? Simply, it can't easily be automated, so upgrading is of necessity a two step process. Run a script for the easy bit, and manually fix up those things the script can't do automatically without danger of destroying data. To help you along, the script and this document give some guidance on the issues, but you do need to have some idea of what version you're coming from and going to in order for that to make sense. The version number of the current version is given on the HTML home page, index.html.
The easy bits are looked after by the upgrade command; to run this download and unpack the new distribution, and as the super user (root) run the following commands:
# cd unpack_location/install
# ./upgrade
WACS - Upgrade
--------------
[...]
Do you wish to continue? (y/n): y
[...]
#
At the end of it's run, upgrade will print out some key notes about things that will require manual attention to get the new release working. The section below will give you some guidance on how these may be achieved.
The upgrade command will give you some information on what extra steps
you may need to take to migrate to this release. For example, it may
tell you that a new database field needs to be added to a particular
model schema. In the transition from 0.5 to 0.6.x the mrace field was
added, and upgrade will tell you about this. First step is to find the
specification of the field from the appropriate SQL script in the
creation directory, so for Oracle this will be
creation/ora_models.sql. From this you will see that the
field specification for Oracle is:
[...] mrace varchar2(15), [...]
You have three options for adding this to the database - you can choose to alter the existing schema (may leave fields in an odd order in describe); you can rename the existing table, create the new one, copy the data across and then repoint any relational constraints to the new table; or you can export your entire database, create a fresh one and import the records back in (the tools for this are incomplete in 0.6.1 but just about usuable). The former is quick and easy if the database supports it but leaves the field list in an odd order; the middle one is more work but produces a fully "normal" schema in the end but requires serious black magic if your database understands relational constraints. The final one is *VERY* experimental at this point but will improve with time.
Here is a worked example that shows how to use the alter table syntax in Oracle's SQL*Plus command interpreter to add one field called mrace:
% sqlplus [...] Username: wacs Password: **** sqlplus> alter table models > add ( mrace varchar2(15) ); Table altered. sqlplus> commit; Commit complete. sqlplus> desc models [...] MRACE VARCHAR2(15) sqlplus> quit %
Another issue you need to be aware of is that the upgrade script will
not over-write any existing files in the wacs web document tree (by
default this is /var/www/html/wacs) because you may well
have tailored them and we wouldn't want to overwrite those. You may well
therefore need to look at what is in the htmlbones directory and copy
some of the new files across into your web tree, or merge the new html
into your modified version of the pages.