[horde] Horde upgrading procedure enhancement

[agullo at comtenidos.com]

Eric Rostetter wrote:
> 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.

Hi Eric,

Thank you for your reply. I'm already including my local config from 
distro config files. It's working ok but I'll keep an eye on it just in 
case I get any strange behaviour. Will try to do my best to simplify 
customization tasks this way until those new features are available.

I'm curious about next major release, the admin interface and the 
improvements/impact about its new features compared to current way to do 
these customization tasks. Any estimated schedule for the next major 
release?

Regards