[Koha] Problems with migrating from Koha 16.05 to 16.11

[David Whelchel]

Hello All,

I have been carefully and regularly updating the koha-common package version on Debian Wheezy 3.2.82-1 x86_64 (and its updates) since Koha version 3.14. Prior to that I ran Koha on the old Windows version (that is now thankfully dead). Now comes Version 16.11. Being an old hand but not being an active programmer, and having years of successful upgrades and builds for my and other libraries I thought, No Problem. Well not so!! I have tried a number of permutations to get this version of Koha built without success.

1) To try a test run I set up an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system as recommend in the online documentation and selected the old stable option as I would need to migrate my database (in MySQL of course). No joy – received “koha-common : Depends: libgd-perl but it is not going to be installed”  at the sudo apt-get install koha-common step.

2) Well, so maybe I should use a fresh install the stable version and see if I can still use MySQL – after all it is still supported in 14.04. But again problems. More dependencies:

koha at koha314:~$ sudo apt-get install koha-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
koha-common : Depends: libarchive-extract-perl but it is not installable
               Depends: libgd-perl but it is not installable
               Depends: libpath-tiny-perl but it is not installable
               Depends: libsereal-decoder-perl but it is not installable
               Depends: libsereal-encoder-perl but it is not installable
               Depends: libwww-youtube-download-perl but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Ok So maybe Ubuntu changes too fast for this version of Koha to keep up with. So I’ll try Debian with both 16.05 and 16.11. But again similar problems and not success.

Where to now. Try the latest LTS versions of Ubuntu and Debian. Bumpkus – but at least I am persistent.

So why this long ramble?

First I believe that there need to be some effort in either making 16.11 work in the recommended Ubuntu and Debian releases as documented or put a real effort into updating the Koha code and dependent applications up to date so that a migration from 16.05 (or earlier versions) can be made seamlessly 50 16.11.x without our librarian non-programmers  going crazy (and not all of them have tech support).

Now put on your flame suits:

I have been actively working in a university central computing center for more than 35 years. The discussion recently about mapping Koha library sites and whether the information and whether Marshall’s map program is open source or not started me to doubt the long term stability of the Koha-common project. I even broke my personal rule and commented to the thread (my commends received silence).

In order for this effort to succeed problems like the inability to use the package upgrade from previous versions to the newest version without problem must be a priority. Koha is a fabulous application and community. I hate to tell you Chris, but proprietary software seldom has these problems; they depend on the stability of their product for their pay checks.

Flame off:

Oh Yeah – if anyone has a solution to an in place upgrade to that the Koha database can be carried forward please let all of us who are experiencing problem know. But I am still expecting crickets.

Thanks

--Dave
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David L. Whelchel
725 SE Derby Street
Pullman, WA 99163
whelchel at pullman.com<mailto:whelchel at pullman.com>

http://www.dlwa.com