At 10:41 AM 9/30/2005 -0400, Dan Wheeler wrote:
>The implication of this is that it is safe to move the list and 
>archive files, but not the templates, across versions.

That is correct.  The templates have changed fairly dramatically in 
the 14.x series from earlier versions, and even between 14.3 and 14.4 
there have been new templates introduced.  The list file and archive 
file formats on the other hand have not changed.

>My specific situation is this: I'm moving from 14.3 on one machine 
>to 14.4 on a new machines with a different OS. We have *no* modified templates.

OK.

>My plan was to install 14.3 on the new machine, move the list files 
>and the archive files from the old machine to the new machine, and 
>then upgrade the new machine to 14.4. It would certainly be easier 
>if I could start by installing 14.4 on the new machine and then move 
>the files from the 14.3 system. Will this work?

If you indeed have no modified templates, yes, because you won't be 
moving any possibly-obsolete templates over with everything 
else.  The concern is if you had heavily modified the site (and some 
people do) that once you did the migration, suddenly things might not 
work as you expected because of the obsolete templates.

>You may remember from earlier discussion here that I've already been 
>through this once. I installed 14.3 on the new machine, moved files, 
>and then upgraded to 14.4. But I had trouble with the upgrade; not 
>all the new files got upgraded properly.

I think I recall this, wasn't it an issue where you needed to touch 
the 14.4 files in the scratch directory, and then run 'make update' 
again?  (I may be thinking of someone else, so forgive me if 
so.)  This can be a problem under unix when the "older" files have 
newer file dates than the "newer" files, which could very well happen 
if you install an older version and then immediately try to update it.

Before we had the .bin installers, we recommended touching the files 
before running 'make update' to avoid this problem.  I was thinking 
that the .bin script does that, but I'll have to go back and take a 
look to see.

At any rate I hope this helps.

Nathan