On 2/4/12 1:28 PM, Dave Stevens wrote:
Dear All,
Recently I got an email from my drupal 7.10 site informing me that there was an update available to version 7.12. The link took me to a pink hued page where I was told that it was advisable to correct a security problem by upgrading to 7.12. I am then informed that there is no automated upgrade, but that instructions are available to manually back up files and databases then carry on with a manual upgrade.
I see this as a real issue with the design of Drupal. It is all very well to find vulnerabilities and announce them, with fixes, but if there is no simple, automated way to apply the fixes there will inevitably be a lot of unpatched cms's out there running outdated and known-vulnerable versions of Drupal.
The developers may, for all I know, be working hard on an automated update and patch mechanism. Can anyone tell me if this is the case? Am I doomed to continue manually applying security fixes as long as I persist with Drupal? I dumped Win95 a long time ago and have really no wish to regress this way.
Dave
Drupal has problems updating itself, as while it is updating itself it needs to be present, but one step of an update is to remove the current set of core files. Drush, the drupal command line tool, being somewhat separate from the Drupal core, is able to do an update mostly autonomously. Drush does use parts of core for other operations. With drush it is fairly easy to apply the update.
You really don't want an update like this to happen "automatically" but only on command, as you REALLY want to know when an update has happened to understand possible sources of strangeness (if it happens shortly after an upgrade, you want to look if it is a known issue with the upgrade, if you haven't done an upgrade recently, it is probably something else you did recently), and to make sure you have done the appropriate backups before doing the upgrade.