The following procedure covers an upgrade from all gnats 3 versions newer than 3.108. If your installation is an older 3.10x version, or even the ancient 3.2 version, you need to review the UPGRADING.old file in the gnats distribution before carrying out the steps detailed here.
Although almost all of the gnats internals have been redesigned and
rewritten for gnats 4, little has changed in the format and
structure of the database data. The only change that needs to be taken
into account when upgrading is the fact that the database index format
is binary in a default installation of gnats 4. Thus, you will
need to regenerate your database index by using the gen-index
tool. In addition, if your old gnats installation was so-called
“release-based”, you need to make some simple modifications to the
database setup file dbconfig. See below for details.
Apart from building and installing new binaries, the major changes which impinge on the upgrade procedure are all on the configuration side. The main database configuration file, dbconfig, is far more complex and powerful than the old config file, and while the installation process creates a sensible set of default values which are similar to gnats 3.11x's defaults, you still need to migrate any changes you may have made to your own local configuration.
Another aspect which needs consideration are remote submitter sites.
Such sites either need to be instructed to upgrade their locally
installed copies of the gnats user tools (send-pr,
edit-pr and query-pr), or they should be given access
through interfaces such as Gnatsweb.
Since the gnats network daemon has been completely reworked, with an entirely new command set, all network-based interfaces, such as Gnatsweb and TkGnats need to be upgraded to versions that support gnats 4. The contrib directory of this distribution contains some third-party interfaces, and the README file contains pointers to where you can obtain the newest versions of these tools.
This document only deals with upgrading gnats itself. Third-party tools should have separate upgrading instructions in their distributions.
send-pr, query-pr etc.) The
locations of these may vary, but in a default gnats 3 installation,
the database(s) reside under /usr/local/share/gnats, the
executables are located in /usr/local/libexec/gnats and the
user tools reside in /usr/local/bin.
--enable-gnats-default-db option when running configure,
in order to set the default database to be one of your already existing
gnats 3 databases.
gnatsd. There is one gnatsd.conf for each database. In
gnats 4, these files have been replaced by a single file named
gnatsd.host_access which contains settings that apply across all
the databases on the server. This file is located in the same directory
as the databases file. You need to combine the host access
settings from all your gnats 3 databases and add them to the
gnatsd.host_access file. Note that you are no longer able to
control host access on a per-database basis. Optionally, you may delete
the old gnatsd.conf files. See Controlling access to gnats databases.
--enable-gnats-default-db configure option
got a default dbconfig installed. This default file contains
field definitions etc. which makes this version of gnats behave
almost exactly like older versions. Copy this default file to the
gnats-adm directories of any other gnats databases that
you may have on your host before you proceed to migrate your old
configuration settings.
The following is a list of the configuration directives that may be present in a config file and their counterparts (if any) in gnats 4.
default keyword in these sections. See The dbconfig file.
notify-about-expired-prs setting in the
dbconfig file.
send-submitter-ack setting in the
dbconfig file.
keep-all-received-headers setting in the
dbconfig file.
debug-mode setting in the dbconfig file.
business-day-hours and
business-week-days in the dbconfig file.
After your are done migrating the settings, you may optionally delete the old config files. Since there are many more configuration settings available in the gnats 4 dbconfig file, you should take some time to review them all before proceeding. See The dbconfig file.
If your old gnats installations was release-based, i.e. it included the fields Quarter, Keywords and Date-Required, you need to define those fields in the dbconfig file by following the instructions in Supporting old gnats “release-based” fields.
crypt() and MD5 passwords (see Controlling access to gnats databases). You need to translate your old
gnatsd.user_access files to the new format by using the
gnats-pwconv tool which was installed in the
EXEC-PREFIX/libexec/gnats directory, typically
/usr/local/libexec/gnats. See Managing user passwords.
gnats. Then run the gen-index
command for each of your databases. See Administrative Utilities for details on how to use
gen-index.