[development] 'old' core 6 & new 7, working together..? +crossite

[Karen Stevenson]

You can of course do both at the same time, first jump from 5 to 6, make
sure things are working right, and then jump from 6 to 7. But I just want to
clarify, in case there was any confusion, that you can't just 'skip' the
in-between version. And you can skip pushing it live but you can't skip
testing it. And if you need to do it anyway, IMO it is actually easier to do
it now, make sure everything is working smoothly in version 6, and then do
the 6->7 jump later.

There are many modules (like CCK) that will need to be upgraded from 5 to 6
before jumping to 7, especially when there are data updates and schema
changes involved. It's time-consuming to write and test update hooks, it's a
huge burden on developers to keep updates working for even one version back,
let alone two. CCK had massive changes between version 5 and 6, we had to
drop any support for taking people from 4.7 straight to 6, and even then
were many situations where the upgrade didn't immediately work smoothly and
admins had to do some tweaking or get help with site-specific issues. There
will be even more massive changes from 6 to 7. We're committed to creating
an upgrade path from 6 to 7. There will be no one writing or testing upgrade
paths from 5 to 7.

The other issue is that D5 is less and less well supported as time goes by,
so you may be stuck for support until you are ready to jump to 7, whereas
support for D6 is good.

As you point out you can avoid re-writing your custom modules for the
in-between version, assuming your site works well enough without them to
test other module upgrades. If you have a lot of custom code that may be a
valid reason. But all the changes from D5 to D6 are mostly still needed and
used in D7, so you still need to figure out what they are.

I personally think any time you save in one place by skipping a version will
be made up elsewhere in time spent figuring out what broke and how to fix
it, but each to his own on that issue :)

Karen

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Ken Winters <kwinters at coalmarch.com> wrote:

> Actually I would say that doing 5->6->7 all at once is a valid approach.
>  You cut down on testing, since
> you have one fewer live push.  You also don't have to worry about replacing
> a module twice (first doing
> a difficult to transition to 6 and then months later rewriting it again --
> just rewrite it in 7 once).
>
> - Ken Winters
>
> On Jan 7, 2010, at 2:22 AM, Csuthy Balint wrote:
>
>  On 8:59 PM, Ad wrote:
>>
>>> website owners don't have any reason left to step over from 5 to 6.
>>>
>>
>> If you are not a Drupal development company, then you have to switch from
>> Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 now. There is no excuse for not doing it.
>>
>>
>


-- 
Karen Stevenson
Lullabot.com
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