[ic] surviving upgrades

Doug Alcorn doug at lathi.net
Tue Jun 1 16:01:49 EDT 2004


On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 14:13, Christopher J. Andre' wrote:
> FYI, the store we've been working on is based on interchange 5.0.  I want
> the company I hired to upgrade the store to 5.2 so that the site could get
> the most recent security fixes.  Somehow they think this is a task that will
> take almost a week.  I was curious what the group thought about that....  

[snip]

> "the features you requested during development of this site required strong
> customization of the interchange functionality/source code.

Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.2 shouldn't be a big deal... 

However, I really don't know anything about what these guys did. 
Interchange can be broken into roughly three pieces: core functionality,
basic foundation catalog functionality, and catalog customizations.  In
several years of using Interchange and many, many customizations I've
only once found the need to really modify the Interchange core.  

When a catalog is developed, it gets a copy of the basic foundation
catalog functionality.  Therefore, changes to the foundation catalog
should have zero bearing on an existing catalog.  The bad news is that
if there are functionality improvments to the foundation catalog the
already developed catalog won't see those.  They'll have to be manually
added in.  That can certainly be time consuming.

The exception to this is the admin interface.  That's really part of the
core functionality, but kindof/mostly depends on certain aspects of the
foundation catalog.  You can usually upgrade Interchange and pick up a
new admin interface without too much problems.  I have a pretty much
from scratch catalog that I still use the admin interace with without
too many issues.  Again, any problems you might have would be new
functionality that might depend on new things in the foundation catalog.

Catalog customizations should be very easy to upgrade from one IC to
another.  There have been some issues around major releases in the
past.  Like I said, I have a heavily modified/from scratch catalog that
has upgraded seamlessly from 4.6 to 5.x.

As an "Interchange Consultant" I'm not about to trash-talk another
consultant/developer's estimates.  It's possible the upgrade could be
very time consuming.  It's also possible the 32 number is just cya and
it will really only take 4 hours.  I'd talk to them and get more
information.  Can they break that estimate down any?  Can they give you
any more details why they think it would take so long?
-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn - Unix/Linux/Web Developing
 oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1  61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
 |_/  mailto:doug at lathi.net http://www.lathi.net




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