Preserving customizations when upgrading

[Heri Bender]

Hi all

What I see is that the deployed jforum-custom.conf is preserved because it is not existing in the jforum.war.

But how preserve other customizations like:
- sophisticated log4j.xml
- tweaked templates, css
- etc.

What is the best approach?

Thanks
Heri Bender

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Heri,
There's not an automated way. It's more a matter of:
1) Copy your changed files elsewhere.
2) Upgrade
2) Merge your changes back in.

[Heri Bender]

That's what I thought. I consider this is a real drawback of JForum.

I have written a concept on how a new "preserve customization" feature can be implemented in JForum in an easy way (see attachement). I'm also willing to contribute this enhancement if you like it.

Unfortunatly I cannot attach a file here. Where can I post it as "request for comment"?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Only images can be attached here. Since elsewhere you mention the JForum version hosted at Google, be aware that that is different from a) mainstream JForum 2, b) mainstream JForum 3 (which doesn't really exist yet, and likely will not exist for a while, if ever), and c) JForum as used here on JavaRanch.

Any such change would only apply to the version hosted at Google, which has its own forums to talk about usage and development at http://jforum.andowson.com/. I think the best way would be to sign up at that forum, and take it from there.

[Heri Bender]

I'm confused about the different forks of JForum. I have checked out (and evaluated) the trunk of http://jforum2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk which is - I believe - released as version 2.3.4. The higher version number advised me to believe that this is the main fork ("mainstream JForum" in your words). And this forum on CodeRanche, because it is quite frequently used, advised me to believe that it belongs together. Am I wrong?

BTW: the patch of the german translation file which I sent to you lately through this forum was based on above trunk, and finally also found checked in there.

The forum on google does not seem to be very much visited. Is the development there going on? Which version of JForum is the most uptodate and promises most to be continued? Can you please clarify? I want to contribute but do not want to contribute to a dead fork.

Thanks!

[Ulf Dittmer]

By "mainstream" I mean the versions put out by the original JForum team (Rafael Steil et al.) hosted at jforum.net. Their last version was JForum 2.1.9, and they are not working on that any more. They are working on JForum 3, but that is far from being finished, and -according to Rafael- will not be finished any time soon.

The JForum 2 fork version hosted at Google Code is active. At the moment Andowson and myself are the principal committers to that. While I'm active here at JavaRanch, Andowson is not, so anything you want to bring to the attention of the JForum2-fork-at-Google-Code team would best be posted in the forums at andowson.com. While that fork hasn't seen a release in a while, and the forums aren't very active, the SVN repository has a number of improvements over the released 2.3.4 version, and those will be part of the next formal release in the not too distant future.

Here in this forum at JavaRanch, most people seem to discuss the now dead 2.1.9 branch. That's why I direct people to Google Code and the forums at andowson.com if I notice they they're really talking about that version, or are looking for an actively maintained version.

(To complicate matters, these forums here run on JForum, and we have a forum about JForum, so some people think JavaRanch is in some way connected to the JForum effort - it's not, and JavaRanch takes no position on these matters. The JForum version that runs here is a heavily-customized version of 2.1.9, and is not available to the general public.)

[Heri Bender]

Thanks for clarification (I suggest to place such a clarification statement as sticky post in this code ranch forum)

So I will change now to the forum of JForum 2.3.4 (http://jforum.andowson.com/forums/list.page) and hope my contributions there will be welcome.