[development] how to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x

[Greg Knaddison]

Hi,

I'm asking this on question to both Devel and Docs because I'm about
to make an "upgrading" screencast and want to be sure that I'm using
the best method.

In our handbook[1] we tell people that before the upgrade they should

"Turn off (but do not uninstall) all modules that are not core modules"

I've done that a few times and it always threw various errors when I
then installed the updated versions of the contrib modules.  I then
started to follow steps more like:

1. Download the new version (i.e. 6.x)
2. Download the 6.x compatible version of all my contribs (fix or
remove the ones that haven't been upgraded)
3. Install the new core and contrib modules
4. Run update.php which will do all of core and contrib at the same
time which, in my experience, causes fewer errors

In discussion last night chx mentioned that the reason we tell people
to disable the contrib modules is to prevent bootstrap.inc from
calling a function that no longer exists and thus locking you out of a
site.  I think that is not a problem as long as you do my steps 2/3.

Does anyone have a concrete, repeatable, simple example of why doing
it my way is worse than the way in the handbook?  I think this might
be a relic of the update process of years gone by that we can now
forget, which would be nice since I think it simplifies the process.

Regards,
Greg

[1] http://drupal.org/upgrade/preparing-the-site

-- 
Greg Knaddison
Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com
World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg