[mantisbt-dev] Upgrading to Mantis 1.1

[Martin F. <mar...@gm...>]

Hello,

we want to provide a Wiki page describing the required upgrade steps for
an update of an already existing Mantis database to the new Mantis 1.1.x
version. This should handle the issues in using the now by default utilized
UTF8 character encoding. There is already a preliminary version of the
description text, which was mainly from a mail on the Mantis mailing list:

http://www.mantisbt.org/wiki/doku.php/mantisbt:upgrade_to_utf8


The plan is to structure it as a step-by-step guide. Following is a
sample outline proposed by Victor Boctor:

1. What is the issue?
2. Is my installation affected?
3. How to Upgrade?


However there are quite a lot of conditions to take into account:

- Are the contents of the previous database instance already UTF8-encoded?
- Will the new database instance use UTF8 encoding?
- Which encoding is using the PHP installation per default - is it UTF8?
  This affects how the text strings are stored in the current database
  before the migration.
- Will the updated Mantis installation use UTF8-encoded language files
  or not?

So to make the procedure a bit easier - what do you think about an
upgrade path describing a few attempts with/without encoding while
upgrading the database contents? At first the database is backed up,
so that it can be restored after any unsuccessfull try. By providing a
way to look at sufficient test data it would be possible to judge about
the result of each attempt and wether to go on to the next possibility.

Should the description also handle how to procede if the previous
installation already used a 1.1.0x Mantis version - like that one at
www.mantisbt.org? I'd like to say this need not a must, it's enough
to support upgrading from the official stable Mantis releases (1.0.x).


What do you think about this issues regarding the upgrade? Any
comments and contributions to the upgrade description are welcome.


Regards,

     Martin