Normally, I would feel stupid not being able to upgrade from RC4 to 2.0 gold, however, I've looked around and I can't find a single topic about how to install from RC4 to gold. What's more, the actual upgrading instructions are vague and skip important steps. I can't tell if I'm supposed to put the extracted files from the "large upgrade" archive into the running forum's folder or not. If I did, it would overwrite all the files, thus defeating the purpose of having a built in "backup" feature before it upgrades.
So, either I am going about this the ENTIRELY wrong way, or someone should please rewrite the instructions for updating. I've been running my site on 1.x all this time waiting for 2.0 to be stable and figured why not try RC4, seems stable enough, but by the time I got things JUST the way I like them, STABLE comes out and now I have to redo everything. I wish there were an in-forum update link like there used to be, or at least some way to sift through files that had not changed any, instead of overwriting things that probably don't have to be.
/me sighs heavily at all his wasted time and having to do it over again...
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Large upgrades do always overwrite every file of your installation - removing all custom edits done to the files.
You should backup ALL your files AND database, always before upgrading,
so you have a way to revert back if something goes wrong.
This covers the upgrade steps fairly well IMO http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Upgrading
But if you have questions on specific steps of it, or something that you feel is missing - please be more specific on what you are having trouble with, and I'm sure we can help and perhaps make the documentation that much better as well. :)
That wiki was what I was referring to when I said the instructions were vague. Just WHERE do you extract the files to and where do you run the upgrade.php from? Do they overwrite your existing forum files before you run the upgrade? I'm asking if you extract them right into your forum folder.
Yes. The large upgrade package contains all the forum files, so you overwrite all your current files with the ones in the package. (Except settings.php etc. that are not contained in the package either.)
The upgrade.php will be amongst them, and will end up in your forum root ( where your forums main index.php is )
and can be run by accessing it through your browser ( for example http://example.tld/forum/upgrade.php )
Thank you, that is what I needed to know. It was confusing with conflicting information spread around. Mostly, it's just never written where to extract the files to.
I quoted your feedback on the documentation to the Doc Team to see, so perhaps it can be improved upon :)
I take back my topic solved. It seems that every mod has appeared uninstalled, however, I cannot reinstall most of them because their tables already exist in MySQL so...without dropping every table, which would ruin the forum, how can I force mods to overwrite their old tables, or just ignore any duplicates and continue installation?
That's actually a recently "discovered" problem with the change on how mod installs are tracked within SMF.
Safest way to go about this would IMO be to uninstall them all one by one, regardless of errors in the uninstallation, and after that reupload fresh Theme and Source files from the upgrade package to make sure no code was actually corrupted in the process. After that you can start over to install mods you wish to still use.
I'll also make a note of this to the devs to make sure this is not forgotten.
EDIT:
Oh, sorry - I re read your post, and it seems I misunderstood you there.
You are saying the mods are actually uninstalled, but can't be reinstalled because of DB changes already existing?
You have two choices that I see. 1) Modify the mod packages to not do the DB changes, or 2) ask the mod authors about how to remove their exact DB changes.
Yes, SMF reports them as uninstalled, but the database entries are pretenting a fair number of installs. I would suppose this is something that plagues many users, perhaps you could suggest to the higher ups an option to prompt overwriting of existing entries upon installation?
if you are having issues installing mods you are best to post in their support threads, if they are coded correctly they should not show errors on the db install since it already exists.
I see. I thought it was a SMF defect. However, I still think an option for a catchall prompt would benefit many users. Thanks for the advice, I'm manually deleting tables presently. -_-