UnifiedInstaller mentioned in download pages, but hard to reach

canepan commented 1 year ago

BUG/PROBLEM REPORT (OR OTHER COMMON ISSUE)

What I did:

I went to https://plone.org/download I selected a Plone version (either 6.0 or 5.2.10 at the time of writing) from the "Download Plone" section

What I expect to happen:

I expected a link to the installation package, and a link to older versions, was readily available

What actually happened:

Version 6.0 redirects me to the installation, which is currently mentioning a beta release (6.0.0b2), but in general is not straightforward on how to install a specific version, nor does help with offline installation.

I think enterprise/secured environments, but even personal installations, would benefit from an easier experience.

Since I am currently running 4.3, and I would like to have the latest release before attempting an upgrade, I also had an hard time finding the 4.3.20 page. Note that the docs still point to the general download page. And even then, the Unified installer is mentioned but not linked...I could find a mention to it in the 4.3.19 page (at the bottom), which I had to copy/paste (no links)

What version of Plone/ Addons I am using:

mauritsvanrees commented 1 year ago

Hello @canepan, thanks for reporting this. Let me check, there is a lot to say here.

Last week we migrated plone.org to Plone 6. Some custom functionality for the site did not make it to the new version: the downloads information in a release is only shown as plain text. I had already moved this information to the release notes for a few releases, at least for 5.2.10.
For 4.3.20 no download links were there at all. Indeed I do not see any downloads for this version on Launchpad. This release was two years ago and I don't remember how it went, but I think we were unable to create a Unified Installer at that point, as the process was too old and could no longer be repaired with reasonable effort.
I have fixed the download links on the 4.3.19 page: they are now clickable. Same for 5.1.6 (latest in 5.1 series is 5.1.7 but this has no Unified Installer), and 5.0.10 (latest in 5.0 series).
For Plone 5.2 the Unified Installer got modernised and fixed, so for most of the 5.2 series, the download links should work. At least the latest 5.2.10 has them, which is the latest release. I am building a new one for 5.2.10.1 at this moment. This should be up soon, but I am waiting a long time on the automated tests on Mac and Windows to run.
For 6.0, the Unified Installer is no longer there. The recommended installation is with Docker. If you know what you are doing, directly using pip or buildout is fine as well.

About Plone 6 documentation:

On https://6.docs.plone.org/install/containers/index.html I see a docker run command that specifies the Plone backend version with plone/plone-backend:6.0.0. Changing this version number should work. Either today or tomorrow there should be a 6.0.0.1 small update with a Zope security fix.
On the Install Plone from its packages page that you found, I see a command cookiecutter https://github.com/collective/cookiecutter-plone-starter. The output at the time of writing indeed gave 6.0.0b2. When I run the command now, it suggests 6.0.0. You can specify any Plone 6 version here, when the command asks this question.

In your case, updating to 4.3.19 first should be fine, there is not that much difference between 4.3.19 and 4.3.20. After you download and extract the Unified Installer, you can optionally look for the buildout config files that point to 4.3.19 and replace those with 4.3.20. (And add some security hotfixes in either case). Afterwards, see the upgrade guide on how to migrate to Plone 5.2. Note that for such a large version step, including the step from Python 2 to 3, collective.exportimport can be a good alternative to the standard in-place migration.

Does this answer you questions?

mauritsvanrees commented 1 year ago

I should add that with collective.exportimport you can go directly from Plone 4.3 to 6.0, and can avoid problems with no longer supported or wanted add-ons, like in this issue you created, because you will start with a fresh site.

canepan commented 1 year ago

Wow, I have been looking for a way to export and reimport for a while. If this is the streamlined way, that's great. I still need a way to have the Plone old version to perform the export, so having references on the site still is useful.

I tried to change the references to 4.3.20 in buildout.cfg, but it failed the build, on the line of many instances of

SyntaxError: 'return' outside function

Regarding 6.0, when I tried docker some time this year, I think it wasn't straightforward how to keep the Data.fs outside of docker (so not to be lost at every update), but I will check again.

I will try the export/import way and report any issue (hopefully I will be able to help, but I doubt)

mauritsvanrees commented 1 year ago

I tried to change the references to 4.3.20 in buildout.cfg, but it failed the build, on the line of many instances of
SyntaxError: 'return' outside function

I don't think this is really an error: I expect buildout to finish. The above is an error that is triggered by a process that checks Python files and is not aware of the special rules for Python skin scripts, where a return outside a function is perfectly fine.

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