[Setup] Re: Will migration ever work?

Hanno Schlichting schlichting at bakb.net
Tue Dec 13 11:36:07 UTC 2005


Hi Nick.

We have tested the migration code on a number of sites before the 
release and meanwhile there have been successful reports from hundreds 
of sites, so I would think that releasing the software as final was 
justifed.

But of course we are aware of some remaining problems of which the 'some 
folders do not migrate' bug is the most serious we know of. The main 
problem here is that nobody so far could tell us how to reproduce this 
bug. But without this we have just no chance to correct it.

Please help us in finding the source of this problem. You could help us 
by providing a zexp of the non-migrating folders. You don't have to give 
us any of your site content but the folder alone.

To do this try to copy your non-migrating folder to a temorary location, 
delete all its content and export it using the export function in the 
ZMI. If you have some more time please try to import this zexp into a 
completly fresh new plone site and follow the steps at 
http://plone.org/documentation/faq/importing-2.0-content-into-2.1.

If the problem is in fact the folder itself, it should still have not 
been migrated. If this is the case please add your zexp to the following 
ticket: http://trac.plone.org/plone/ticket/4567.

Additionally the catalog record of the problematic folder might shed 
some light on this. You could also go to the portal_catalog in the ZMI 
and find the catalog record under the catalog tab. Then add the full 
metadata listed there to the above mentioned ticket.

Thanks for your help,
Hanno

Nick Davis wrote:
> We've been spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to migrate from
> 2.0.5 to 2.1.1 .
> This is a great shame because migration is a showstopper on what
> otherwise looks like an exciting new release with more functionality and
> much better performance.
> 
> I question whether the migration code was tested enough. It
> should have been tested on a number of Data.fs s from many different
> users. This would have revealed fragilities, and bugs would have been 
> fixed before an official release, but I struggle to believe enough of 
> this happened, because otherwise there wouldn't be such problems.
> 
> If anything from the core Plone has been customised in the existing
> site, Plone 2.1.1 inevitably breaks without particularly useful error 
> messages. Perhaps the migration procedure should first go looking for 
> customisations and give warnings. With simply a list of changed files, 
> the migration code could search for and flag up customised versions of
> files that are in this list. Though we're not meant to customise through 
> the
> ZMI, most of the books unfortunately tell you initially to do this,
> and I imagine most sites have had some customising through the ZMI at
> some point because most people do what the books tell them, until later
> realising that developing on the filesystem is better.
> How many existing, not very technical, users, are going to be bitten by 
> this?
> 
> Whats happened now is some of our Members folders are not converting 
> properly, from PloneFolder to ATFolder etc. I've tried various things 
> including deleting our products and bits of our site first. It seems 
> other people have similar problems. I've tried Raphael Ritz's trick on 
> my folders and most of them did convert, though this doesn't seem to 
> work on the parent Members folder which is a Large Plone Folder. But 
> that is no way to go about migrating a production system. There is 
> always the chance of missing a folder and having a site in an undefined 
> state.
> 
> To anyone who thinks their migration worked properly, I recommend
> inspecting every directory on your site through the ZMI, to make sure it
> is indeed an ATFolder not still a PloneFolder.
> 
> I know everyone is severely stretched on resources, and freely
> gives of their time, and this release is a great achievement, but why 
> release something which will cause people inevitably to run into 
> problems like this? This is not a way to grow mindshare in Plone. Should 
> this perhaps be described as experimental, not a stable release?
> 
> Would it have been better to stay with 2.0.5 and not release 2.1 at all, 
> than release something that looks great but isn't really ready, and 
> people on 2.0.5 spend ages struggling to migrate?
> 
> Please no-one take offence. I still like Plone despite the problems. I 
> am sure Plone 2.1 is a great achievement and look forward to getting it 
> working......er.....at some point in time.  ;-)
> 
> Nick
> 




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