User experience: upgrading to 1.2.0rc3

[Markus Schiltknecht <..hidden..>]

Hi,

this is my story of an unsuccessful try to upgrade from 1.1.x to 
1.2.0rc3. It's not a complaint, it's rather meant to show some 
misunderstandings of a beginner on ledger-smb (and some gotchas due to 
not reading README files).


As my server is on debian sarge and has outdated packages, I decided to 
try it on my desktop, which runs debian etch. I installed the following 
packages, after some fiddling with 'perl Build.PL':

libapache2-mod-perl2 libapache2-mod-perl2-dev libapache2-mod-perl2-doc 
libmodule-build-perl liblocale-maketext-lexicon-perl libdbd-pg-perl 
libmime-lite-perl libdbi-perl libnet-tclink-perl libparse-recdescent-perl

Then, I was still missing Config::Std. I've downloaded that (and 
Class::Std, a dependency) and built a debian packages from those.

So I also installed: libversion-perl (another dependency of 
Config::Std), libclass-std-perl (homebrown), libconfig-std-perl 
(homebrown, too).

Now perl Build.PL succeeded.

Running ./Build test now, according to the UPGRADE documentation, 
failed: Can't open config file 'ledger-smb.conf' (no such file or 
directory).

At that time, I've discovered the file README.debian and figured, it 
might be a good idea to read that. dists/deb/required_debs.txt lists 
these additional packages, which are not installed at that point in 
time. Please note, however, that perl Build.PL didn't complain:

libconfig-any-perl libdata-dumper-simple-perl libhtml-linkextractor-perl 
libmd5-perl libmodule-pluggable-perl


Now, I remembered vaguely, that upgrading should be done by copying all 
the new contents over the old directory. So, that's what I did for 
getting back my ledger-smb.conf back. Unfortunately, it still errored 
out :-(  Using the ledger-smb.conf.default or installing the above 
packages didn't help. That's where I gave up.

Regards

Markus