I manage 3 wiki webs with different levels of customization. upgrading releases is becoming a bit tricky... Here is the procedure I use, this may be useful for others, and hints to what should be changed in TWiki distrib structure as well for easier upgrade...

It works for my case: standard dir hierarchy, unix utils available.

I cut-n-paste the shell parts into a bash shell window, belonging to the user ID of the apache web server or root.

First, define the 3 variables below for you installation, and check you have the following programs installed:

• tkdiff http://www.accurev.com/free/tkdiff/
• rsync http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
• cr-remove http://koala.ilog.fr/ftp/pub/cr-remove

The following part is different for each of my sites:

  set -a
  CUR=/www/wiki            # where your current wiki install is running
  OLD=/tmp/TWiki20010901   # where you uncompresseded the plain Sep rel
  NEW=/tmp/TWiki20011201   # where you uncompresseded the plain Dec rel
  TMP=/www/wiki2           # working copy of new wiki

be cautious and do a backup (once is sufficient):

  # backup wiki in case something goes wrong, dont overwrite sane backup
  # restore by: cd /;rm -rf $CUR;tar xfzpsPS /tmp/wiki-backup-for-dec01-upg.tgz
  if test ! -e /tmp/wiki-backup-for-dec01-upg.tgz;then
    cd $CUR; tar cfzpsPS /tmp/wiki-backup-for-dec01-upg.tgz .
  fi

then, here is my procedure: I just cut-n-paste this: (this part can be re-issued as long as something fails)

# make working copy, excluding the contents
rm -rf $TMP
rsync  -au --hard-links --whole-file --devices  --delete \
  --sparse --one-file-system --force --include='data/TWiki**' \
  --exclude='pub/[A-Z]**' --exclude='data/[A-Z]**' --exclude '*,v' \
  $CUR/. $TMP

cd $NEW
>/tmp/null
# remove distrib parts that should not be used
rm -rf data/Main data/Test data/Trash pub/Test pub/Trash
rm -rf data/debug.txt data/warning.txt data/.htpasswd pub/favicon.ico pub/wikiHome.gif
rm -rf data/[A-Z]*/WebNotify.txt* data/[A-Z]*/WebPreferences.txt* data/[A-Z]*/WebStatistics.txt* data/*/.changes

rm -rf $TMP/MERGE_BIN $TMP/MERGE_CONFLICTS $TMP/MERGE_ERRORS
for i in `find . -type d`;do if test ! -d $TMP/$i;then mkdir $TMP/$i;fi;done
for i in `find . -type f`;do
  i="${i#./}"
  case "$i" in
  *,v) ;;
  *.[dD][lL][lL]|*.[gG][iI][fF])
    if cmp -s $OLD/$i $NEW/$i; then :; else 
      if test ! -e  $TMP/$i; then cp -a $i $TMP/$i
      elif cmp $TMP/$i $NEW/$i; then :
      else
        echo "$i" >> $TMP/MERGE_BIN
      fi
    fi ;;
  *) if test ! -e $TMP/$i; then cp -a $i $TMP/$i
     else
       if test -e $OLD/$i; then OLDF=$OLD/$i; else OLDF=/tmp/null;fi
       cr-remove $TMP/$i $OLDF $NEW/$i
       merge -q $TMP/$i $OLDF $NEW/$i
       case $? in
        1) echo $i >> $TMP/MERGE_CONFLICTS;;
        2) echo $i >> $TMP/MERGE_ERRORS;;
       esac
     fi;;
  esac
done

echo "============ echo Solving `wc -l $TMP/MERGE_CONFLICTS` conflicts by hand:"
for i in `cat $TMP/MERGE_CONFLICTS`; do
  echo $i
  tkdiff -o $TMP/$i -conflict $TMP/$i 
done
if test -s $TMP/MERGE_ERRORS; then
echo '============ MERGE ERRORS:'; cat $TMP/MERGE_ERRORS
fi
if test -s $TMP/MERGE_BIN; then
echo '============ MERGE BIN FILES:'; cat $TMP/MERGE_BIN
fi

Version-specific upgrades

# From Sep 2001 to Dec 2001
cd $TMP
for i in data/*/WebIndex.txt;do if test ! -e ${i%/*}/WebTopicList.txt;then cp data/_default/WebTopicList.txt ${i%/*};fi;done

Then, if all went well above, you can test in place the new version in $NEW, and then copy back the updated version:

  cd $TMP;tar cfpsPS - .| ( cd $CUR; tar xfpsPS -)

So here it is. It may help some other people out there...

-- ColasNahaboo - 14 Dec 2001

Notes

• If you do this as another user as the UID of the web server, check file permissions afterwards
• check the first line of the bin/ script, to see if the perl path is the good one

-- ColasNahaboo - 14 Dec 2001

There is an UpgradeTwiki script available for the latest TWikiRelease01Sep2004.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Sep 2004