[wp-hackers] Simplified Upgrade Process

[Ryan Boren]

Carthik Sharma wrote:
> On 2/1/06, Vogel, Andrew (vogelap) <VOGELAP at ucmail.uc.edu> wrote:
> 
>>I got it from http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress, though
>>http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Carthik/Five_Step_Upgrade tells me just
>>to overwrite.
>>
>>I'm comfortable doing it either way, however, I think that instructing
>>Joe User to delete and upload (instead of overwriting) is cumbersome,
>>inelegant, and prone to mistakes.
> 
> 
> Having thought about upgrade woes, at least for some Unix/Linux users,
> the path of least resistance seems to be a tool (admin page?)  which:
> 
> 1) Asks the user to upload the wp.tar.gz file containing the source
> for the next version.
> 2) Compares the core files with the right tag in SVN to identify files
> that have changed
> 3) Offers the files that differ from the unaltered core for download,
> either individually, or as a gzipped archive.
> 4) Untars the new .tar.gz over the existing
> 5) Asks user to check and restore any of the user-modified files
> 
> For this to work, of course, the "upgrade page" should be up even if
> the rest of the world is broken, which will take some imaginitive
> smithing.
> 
> Advantages:
> The user need only visit the upgrade page and follow through with the
> steps required
> 
> Cons:
> Not all hosts might have diff/tar installed (maybe bundle the
> essential functions with wp then?)
> 
> Forgive me if I sound like I am speaking when I am drunk :)

That would be nice if file management on most hosts weren't such pain. 
You have to worry with permissions, safe_mode crack, security concerns, 
and so on.  See what happened when we tried to get the disk cache and 
uploads going.

Ryan