[Moin-user] Upgrade to 1.6 A Painful Failure

[Thomas Waldmann]

> I hate to whine, but I just lost the last 3 hours in a futile attempt to upgrade
> my MoinMoin wiki from 1.5.6 to 1.6.3 on a Windows box with Python 2.5

Why didn't you just ask on IRC? That's faster than ML.

> 1. The upgrade process is not documented, as far as I can tell. There is a
> migration readme,

That's all about data migration.

>  but nothing that covers the overall process.

Well, there is also docs about that. You can even use the installation
docs, it is not that much different as far as moin files are
concerned...

There are also help pages on upgrading as well as some "alternative
upgrading docs" from some users in the moin wiki.

If that's not enough, well, then we are obviously missing someone who
takes all that stuff and makes the ultimate upgrade docs from it. That
could be you (or anyone else reading this >:).

> Since there is no
> installer or script to automate the upgrade

As we don't know locations of your stuff (and what server method you
use, what server software you use, what OS you use, ...), we can't do
that.

> 2. After reading through the documentation that I could find, I determined that
> I needed to create a full backup of my code directories and my wiki directories,
> install the new version over top of the existing and finally do a data migration
> step. The backup and install worked fine, but it took me a while to understand
> how to do the data migration. I finally ended up running moin.py from my wiki
> directory. It said it did something and didn't report any errors, so I was
> satisfied.
> 
> 3. At this point I expected everything to just work, but it didn't. Hitting the
> site returned a CGI error. No idea why, the cgi file had not changed and none of
> the paths had changed. After about an hour of screwing around and searching for
> answers, I finally copied the new cgi file that came with the new version to my
> wiki and modified it to match my set up. Voila, now Moin runs, sort of.

Well, the server adaptor code (cgi script in your case) is part of the
moin code and sometimes has to be changed. We don't do it with every
minor upgrade, but updating this part of the code is also recommended.

> 4. Moin returns some pythonic error complaining about uft-8 being a bad
> encoding. After looking at the debug information I figured out that the problem
> was the author's name Jurgen somebody. The u in his name was a unicode character
> and disliked. So I searched through all of the files in my wiki for his name,
> removed it and voila, now my wiki runs, sort of.

All your wiki data should be in utf-8 encoding. So if that error
happens, something has gone very wrong (either someone has put non-utf-8
data into the wiki somehow) or some older migration was not done
correctly (very old moin versions had iso-8859-1 encoding as standard
and the converter script converted that to utf-8 back then).

> 5. Authentication was busted,

Auth has change since 1.5 (and will change again for 1.7), and is
documented in docs/CHANGES (as well as on Help*).

We also have sample configs (even more in 1.7, more snippet like) that
might answer some questions.

> I could log in but it didn't know who I was (no profile).
> My Start Page was missing (yes it was configured, that hadn't
> changed).

I don't understand what you mean here.

>  When I brought up an existing page stuff like the TableOfContents
> macro no longer worked.

Then you did not run the migration correctly. The 1.5 to 1.6 migration
converts most of the wiki markup to 1.6.

> In general I like MoinMoin and I do want to upgrade. But there needs to be
> easily accessible help on how to do it.

Well, we had lots of changes, so you won't find a short list of what to
do, because the list is there, but it is not short (docs/CHANGES, Help
pages, README.migration).

Writing more docs also does not help much because even the docs that are
there are obviously not (completely) read, so it won't get better if we
just add MORE docs.

I don't say that the docs can't be improved (they sure can), but I want
more concrete requests (or patches or wiki edits). All the install docs
are on the master wikis (master16.moinmo.in and master17.moinmo.in, see
also MoinMoin:EditingOnMoinMaster).

Maybe you find these pages useful:

http://moinmo.in/RickVanderveer/MigratingFromMoin15ToMoin16


http://moinmo.in/ThomasWaldmann/AnotherWayToMigrateFrom1.5To1.6