On 09 Nov 2005, at 13:24, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:



On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Kieran Lal wrote:


Hi, as part of the Drupal administration user experience survey we
are improving the upgrade instructions for Drupal.  This was listed
as the 5th most difficult administration task.

During interviews with administrators we learned that people want to
know if they need to upgrade their database or just apply new files
as in the recent security releases.

I have created a page: Do I need upgrade my database? http://
drupal.org/node/37017

I was told that the changelog ( http://drupal.org/CHANGELOG.txt )
contained this information.  But it is not obvious to me.  How do I
create an official list of which releases require a DB update?


Rule of thumb:

Major releases have a db upgrade, minor ones don't.

The latter was not true for the 4.6.1 release, I think. It was the first
to break the rule, IIRC.

Speaking of such, I think there may be a lurking problem with the 4.6.x (where x>0) to 4.7 upgrade.

IIRC, the mechanism for determining what updates need to be applied is a string >= comparison on the date of the update.

The last update for 4.6.0 was "2005-03-21" (I think). Since then, there have been a number of updates in the 4.6.x trunk and a different sequence of updates in the 4.7 trunk. I think this creates the risk that some of the 4.7 upgrades (i.e. those with dates <= the 4.6.x upgrades) will get skipped.

Has anyone verified that the 4.6.x -> 4.7 upgrade does in fact get all of the 4.7 schema updates? I can't; I just don't have time to spend on Drupal until well after the 4.7 release.

-Eric