[horde] Upgrade to Horde4, or stay with 3?

[Simon Brereton]

It would be nice if everyone could stop top-posting please.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: horde-bounces at lists.horde.org [mailto:horde-
> bounces at lists.horde.org] On Behalf Of Reindl Harald
> >> Hi all... I have been watching with interest the posts from people
> >> upgrading to H4 and am keen to do so, with some good functionality
> >> and improvements that will make several things easier for my
> family setup...
> >>
> >> BUT there are a couple of things that I am hesitant about.
> >>
> >> I have a full function H3 setup
> > (snip)
> > Am 11.05.2011 18:25, schrieb Bruno Costacurta:
> > Hello,
> >
> > IMHO I'll answer 'No'. Why ?
> > It seems the configuration file conf.php is not portable from H3.
> > So there is the need to start from scratch file conf.php from H4.
> > Meaning the lost of all specific configuration used in previous H3.
> >
> > (note : I queried the mailing list about this (lack of ?)
> portability H3 to H4 but got no clear answer about this).
> >
> > Bye,
> > Bruno
> >
> >
> the main question is: are the still updates for Horde3 in the future?
> 
> if not we get really funny because one have the choice between
> secruity-problems or some days to migrate his whole stuff and pray
> that it works really
> 
> i will never understand why somebody thinks it is a good attitude to
> throw away backward-compat......
> 
> seeing that there no longer tarballs, the PEAR splitted in thousands
> of packages without thinking one second what this means for rpm-
> driven systems and apckage-builders feels like nobody cares about
> users as also in bugreports like http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/9670

Firstly, you could copy over the H3 file and edit.  But to do so, you'd need to know what features have changed and the reasons for those changes.  And it's not likely you could do that without doing a clean H4 install and looking at the new file.  But then you'd already have a new H4 file - so at the point the work you're trying to avoid will have been done.  Why not just do a diff on the two files and move over the options you're really concerned about (assuming you didn't set them properly as you were setting up the H4 file)?

Secondly, even if it were possible to just copy the H3 config.php into the H4 install, you still need to update the DB (there is a script for this), but the data migration is actually far more effort than generating an H4 file from scratch.  And anyway as a systems admin you should be keen (and required) to investigate and understand all the new options and their locations in the config panel.  But after doing the DB update you'd have to make sure that none of your H3 imported changes don't break anything, so setting up a clean H4 config.php is a smarter option.  And takes 30 minutes tops.

Thirdly, any custom changes you'd previously made in backends.php, servers.php, attributes.php, etc will now be over-written the next time you do an upgrade, so you have to move those to backends.local.php, attributes.local.php, etc, so you have editing work ahead of you anyway.  Why double that by trying to force an H3 file into an H4 format?

If you've ever done a major Exchange upgrade, you'll realise that these steps are trivial.

Lastly, what do tar-balls have to do with an rpm system?  If you're running an rpm system, why would you want to have some packages that are manually installed?  Surely the move to PEAR means that the installation is now even more rpm compatible?  I don't see a difference between 

rpm install horde.rpm
pear install horde/horde

I do see a difference between 

rpm install horde.rpm
pear install horde/horde
and
tar -zxvf horde-4.0.2.tgz
mv horde-4.0.2 /mywebroot/horde4


If it's a matter of rolling out the image to multiple servers, I'd like to know how many servers in the farm you have to install this on.


Did my install go smoothly?  No.  Did I learn a bit?  Yes.  Did my issues matter?  No - because I did a dummy rollout first.  Am I confident that my planned migration from H3 to H4 will go smoothly?  Yes - because I have a 4 page document of notes and steps to follow that I made from my stage install.  And because I have back-ups of the H3 DB.  Am I bitching about free SW that is the most comprehensive alternative to OWA?  No.  Do I wish to see more of the H3 apps ported to H4?  Yes - but given what I've seen so far, I think it will be worth the wait.


Simon