[wp-hackers] Upgrade instructions fatally flawed for Mac

[Mark Jaquith]

On Jan 17, 2007, at 2:42 PM, Andy Staines wrote:

> Copy a folder onto an existing folder with the same name and the  
> original content is wiped and replaced by the new content. That  
> will include any sub-folders that may have been in there as well.  
> Forget FTP - it's nothing to do with FTP. It's how OSX will deal  
> with the command.

This isn't just a Mac issue... all *nix OSes behave this way.  It is  
Windows with its "replace == merge" convention that is the exception.

> It would probably be easiest going forward if 2.1 created a new non- 
> user folder such as wp-system-content. That way existing  
> installations could be upgrade without changing the name of or  
> replacing the files in wp-content.

That'd introduce a lot of complexity and break backwards  
compatibility in a lot of things.  I like the general principle of  
deleting the wp-content directory from the upgrade package before  
dropping it on top of an existing install.  The only issue there is  
that plugins and default themes don't get updated, but it saves your  
data, which is a bigger concern.

--
Mark Jaquith
http://markjaquith.com/

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