[horde] Horde upgrading procedure enhancement

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting agullo at comtenidos.com:

> Consolidating/patching our configuration with new dist config files is a
> tedious task if done by hand, and unreliable if done thru any scripts.
> Every future upgrade would require another patching cycle, and so on.

This is basically true for the current releases.  The next major release
has an administrator configuration menu that works differently.

> So I guess it'd be a nice idea to enable local specific configuration
> files, so that you can install new releases without overwriting custom
> local config.

Just rename your config files to *-local.php, then copy *.php.dist to
*.dist, then edit *.php files to add an include of your *-local.php
as the last line.

> You can safely overwrite release default config while installing new
> releases.

No, you can't.  The value expected for a setting may change, and hence
your old values would not work.  So you can't safely do this.  (It might
work in most cases, but there would be fringe cases where it would fail
and hence not be safe).

> When Horde is executed, distro conf files would also include
> local conf files. Any settings/params would be redefined from local conf
> if needed.

See above for how to implement this locally.

> Future releases might safely add new settings and features.

Yes, but how about change/rename settings?  Can't do that safely.

> If those new settings are not present on custom files, distro defaults
> would safely apply until local specific settings are added to locally
> include_once'd files.

Which puts you back to the same old problem of syncing your files with
the *.dist files, which is what you are trying to avoid.

> I'm already adding include directives to mainstream config files to load
> my settings and test it that way, but I wonder if it's already enabled
> on cvs branch or planned for next versions, just in case this idea may
> help versions management

No, the next major release does things totally different.

> Regards

--
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Why get even? Get odd!