After yesterday’s success upgrading Gallery, I decided it was time to upgrade the Browncroft Neighborhood Association CMS. It was running Drupal 5.1, and I see from the Drupal web site that the currently supported versions are 5.7 and 6.1. So first I tried upgrading to 5.7, and that worked fine. Then I tried upgrading to 6.1, and that failed horribly. Fortunately, both times I made a copy of the site on a test address in order to try the upgrade, which allowed me to try a few different approaches.
The upgrade to 5.7 didn’t require all the stuff they always tell you to do, like turning off all the optional modules and setting your theme to the default. The second upgrade failed silently a couple of times until I did it by the book and *did* turn off the optional modules. And that’s when I discovered that the upgrade script failed on some “ALTER TABLE” commands, which makes me think that it was expecting a newer version of PostgreSQL than the one I have installed.
I note that Debian Etch has both PostgreSQL 7.4 and PostgreSQL 8.1 packages available. I installed 7.4 because it was the default. But from work, I know 8.1 has more “ALTER TABLE” commands than 7.4. So now I’m trying to figure out just how I go about changing my 7.4 installation to 8.1 without breaking Drupal, Gallery, and all my custom configuration. So, lazyweb? Anybody out there do that upgrade and know?