Migration/Upgrade

Initial remarks

This is the very first installment of the documentation on this subject, so please bare with us, and please submit your comments or suggestions as you perform your own upgrades or migrations.

Introduction

The general idea is to treat a full migration as a series of controlled upgrades. In another words, upgrade or replace components of the Islandora Minimum Viable Functionality within the context of each milestone, and use its test mechanism to ensure the upgrade works.

For instance, the most frequent releases come from Drupal. That would be milestone 2. Once you perform the Drupal upgrade test that milestone by itself and all subsequent milestones, keeping every other component of the stack unchanged. So, before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal.

The next most frequent release upgrade is Islandora itself, and for most cases it's backward compatible with older versions of Fedora. That would be milestone 5 onwards. So again, before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal. The proceed to the upgrade and testing of milestones 5 and 6.

The least frequent new releases are that of Fedora, and since it's the most basic of all components of the solution stack it could be a little trickier. Again, before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal, Then proceed to milestone 1 installation and testing, leaving all other components above alone. After that move on to "fix" any outstanding issues with subsequent milestone, in the normal order.