[hobbit] Upgrading Hobbit Question

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 02:48:34PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
> I upgraded a hobitt instance from 4.0beta4 (yes terribly old but it has 
> been working fine), to 4.1.2 (actually latest snapshot), and after the 
> upgrade the main page still said it was version 4.0beta4, even after a 
> new host that I added showed up on the display.
> 
> I was sure if it was a caching problem or what, so what I ended up doing 
> was saving a copy of bb-hosts.cfg ,hobbitalerts.cfg, and  to /tmp, then 
> I totally deleted the "server" directory and reinstalled, put the config 
> files back, fired up hobbit and all seemed well.

Not sure why that happened .. 4.0-beta4 is pretty old (in fact, it is
the oldest release I have lying around - older than that, I'd have to
fetch it from my RCS archive).

> My question is, how does hobbit handle doing an upgrade? It didnt 
> replace my bb-hosts file, so apparently it is aware of the existance of 
> one different from the default and doesn't overwrite it...does it do the 
> same checks for the various files in the other subdirectories?

With beta's and snapshots, all bets are off - but when upgrading from
one official release to another, "make install" tries fairly hard to
handle configuration files the right way:

* It won't touch an existing bb-hosts file.

* It will try to add new entries to the hobbitlaunch.cfg,
  hobbitserver.cfg, hobbitgraph.cfg, hobbitcgi.cfg and columndoc.csv 
  files. It doesn't delete anything, since it could be entries that 
  you've added yourself for custom scripts and extensions.

* For the GIF's, webpage header/footer templates and the like,
  Hobbit uses an MD5 checksum to see if the version on your box is
  one of the default ones shipped with an older version of Hobbit.
  If it is, then it will replace it with the current version.

* Files that have been renamed - currently, it's only hobbitd_larrd
  which was renamed to hobbitd_rrd - it will delete the old file, 
  but set up a symlink so any references to the old filename still 
  work, but hit the new file.


> Maybe there should be a makefile option ("make upgrade-install") to 
> upgrade, that saves your config files but totally replaces all 
> preexisting hobbit components, to make sure nothing old is hanging 
> around, like I ended up having both a hobbit.sh and a starthobbit.sh 
> (the old one) in my server directory.

I think "make install" should just do what it does now. "starthobbit.sh"
went away between RC4 and RC5.


Regards,
Henrik