Is the upgrade path going to be smooth?

#1 By: rubydoob, February 6th, 2013 18:22

Is the upgrade path going to be smooth if we run a site with the current codebase?

#2 By: jbn, February 7th, 2013 04:29

Curious about this too though I'd consider "No" a perfectly good answer I think a modern framework like Rails offer pretty good migration support, so I'd hope so.

It does give early adopters more safety and a bit of incentive.

#3 By: Valts, February 7th, 2013 04:35

Probably not, as this is hardly a production-worthy version yet. Though it's close. :)

#4 By: Jeff Atwood, February 8th, 2013 03:42

Discourse is available as a fully open source project as of Feb 5th 2013, and that means anyone can install a Discourse instance for any reason. Which is perfectly fine and all 100% part of the plan, but...

Being a bleeding edge Discourse forum install might be a little ... unhealthy and dangerous for the first six months. We have strong warnings for the super early Discourse forum adopters, and you should consider carefully how you'll upgrade over the next few months. We expect there to be significant code churn as we work through post launch issues.

First of all, it is not really advisable to install a live Discourse forum in the first six months after launch. This is at best beta software, and very very early beta. We plan to make tons of changes after lauch in the process of hosting our "rule of three" white glove special friend forums here on our servers. See http://www.discourse.org/buy/
If you are installing it just to play around or test as a developer or enthusiast, that's probably fine. Great even! It's when your forum starts "accidentally" morphing into a stable real-live community that I'd be worried.
For the early adopters, we wanted at least one strong tie to the central hub: notification of new version releases. We can't control your third party Discourse install nor do we really want to, but we need you to upgrade aggressively particularly early on. We now have "ping the discourse hub for version update info" to make it easy(ish) for Discourse installs to stay up to date! Just check your /admin/ panel for details.

Our "rule of three" hosted forums won't have these problems because they will be getting special white glove treatment from us. We will of course support third-party installs via http://meta.discourse.org topics, but people should know what they're getting into if they set up a forum on day zero of our release and expect everything to go smoothly -- this is brand new software, and although we've worked hard over the last 8 months to make it awesome, there are inevitably going to be a lot, and I mean a LOT LOT, of rough edges.. that we feverishly polish away for the first 6 months after release.

Bottom line: expect pain, and lots of it, if you actually deploy a forum on the current bleeding edge Discourse beta code.

#5 By: Julian, February 8th, 2013 08:22

Please please make a one-click update button and update notifications like in Wordpress. You wanna be like Wordpress, right?

#6 By: Jeff Atwood, February 8th, 2013 15:48

I'm not aware of any Ruby webapps that even attempt to do what WordPress does with easy one-click updates on the server -- feel free to correct me if I am wrong -- but I agree, that is the goal.

Even if it might be extraordinarily difficult in Ruby.

#7 By: jbn, February 11th, 2013 15:30

At least I'm clear what I'm walking into ;)

But for your own sake I can only imagine that you would have a data migration path to keep meta running on a recent version at all times. I was sort of hoping to piggy-back on that.

I know Django can use South for most things, I have no idea what RoR uses.

#8 By: Sam Saffron, February 14th, 2013 05:09

Well, we use migrations, and are following pretty strict guidelines of what is allowed in migrations and what is not.

That said, there is no chance we are going to test every single upgrade path imaginable. We are going to support upgrades from official point releases, using a common data format we plan to ratify.

#9 By: rubydoob, March 20th, 2013 09:50

Just noticed that ember.js is also running discourse, have things stabalized or they just chose to run discourse knowing full well they might have issues with updates?

#10 By: Brentley Jones, March 20th, 2013 10:31

I believe that Discourse the company is hosting and handling the upgrades for them, similar to their 3 launch partners.

#11 By: rubydoob, May 15th, 2013 14:34

Is the current code base still considered 'bleeding' edge, installer beware, I wouldn't use this on production type state? :)