Adrian Moya's picture

Ok, I was chasing this one (and drupal 7) in the hope that they get to the final TKL release. Today the announcement of moodle 2 is out, I hope it's not too late to make it to the final release. 

Hope to see Drupal 7 soon too...

Forum: 
Liraz Siri's picture

I can see how most people who are installing Moodle for the first time would want to start with the new major version. It has lots of good features and is recommended for deployment on new servers. As a practical matter supporting Moodle 2 means we would need to install Moodle from upstream and that you couldn't use the package manager to upgrade it in the future, but Ubuntu doesn't support Moodle anyhow so maybe that doesn't make a big difference...

The alternative to installing from upstream is to wait a few days to see if Debian sid comes out with a Moodle 2 package. I doubt it will happen in a few days but we might get lucky. On the other hand that brings us back into Debian/Ubuntu hybrid territory which we said we wouldn't do.

So I think for Moodle 2 just installing from upstream would be best.

Also if we support Moodle 2 it will probably be as a separate appliance because it looks like like the Moodle 2 upgrade process can be a bit involved and you have to be running Moodle 1.9 and up. The previous version of TurnKey Moodle uses 1.8.2. So people would have a hard time upgrading from that directly to Moodle 2.

Jeremy Davis's picture

As TKL v11.x is Ubuntu 10.04 based, but considering that Ubuntu 10.04 was in turn based on Debian 6.0/Squeeze (while it was still in testing AFAIK - it is now stable) then I would imagine that it would play nicely.

As you may already be aware, TKL does not currently have any Debian Squeeze release - there was a Debian 5.0/Lenny Core beta but after discussion and consideration the core devs decided to jump straight to Squeeze although they have been tied up with other stuff and there is yet to be a Squeeze based release. They have a todo list a mile long so I have no idea how long we'll have to wait until we see a new Debian beta.

Adrian Moya's picture

I'll be honest: I've never installed moodle in my life! And never use it! But I have it in my sight for future projects. So I was waiting the mayor release. If I were a common internet citizen, I'd would want to start from 2.0. Else, If my appliance start with 1.9, either way I'll have to upgrade. Being new to the app, this presents me with work without even starting the site. And this is of course considering that 2.0 is a big jump from 1.x. (which I think it is)

Current users and future users know their appliances are going to need upgrades. If their systems are already running 1.8.2, they won't be installing a from a new TKL iso if they wanted to upgrade. They'll have to run the standar procedure in their current appliance OR migrate data from two separate instances, in which case having 2.0 running already helps more than having 1.9.

So, I don't have anything against two appliances, but don't understand completely why this could be better. Maybe in the TKLBAM upgrade scenario... ?

Liraz Siri's picture

The Lucid based TurnKey Moodle 11.0RC uses Moodle 1.9.4 and has a newer set of packages than the TurnKey Moodle based on Hardy but other then that it's the same. Upgrading between Hardy and Lucid with TKLBAM is likely to work. The more an appliance changes (e.g., upstream installation vs package installation) the more problems you are likely to run into if you use TKLBAM to upgrade because paths have changed, maybe the name of the database is different in the packaged version (Debian patch things as they please), etc.

According to the Moodle docs that you can't upgrade directly from 1.8 to 2.0. But you can upgrade from 1.8 to 1.9 and you can use TKLBAM to help you with that so there's a clear upgrade path. It is also conceivable that you may not be able to upgrade directly because 2.0 made greater changes and breaks your customizations in a way that 1.9 doesn't because it's still the same major version.

This wouldn't be the first time we have two different major versions of the same application in the library. We did that initially with Drupal until interest in Drupal 5 shut off completely.

L. Arnold's picture

Moodle is similar to Joomla.  I am wanting to move from hardy to Lucid in Joomla moving my Joomla Install.  Is this easy?  What might be the process?  (Question should be on the support side, but it is related to the "Two Appliances" comment from Liraz above).

Jeremy Davis's picture

But depending on the level of customisation and whether you've followed the 'rules' re file placements etc (as discussed elsewhere here on the forums) the reality may be a little different. Also whether you've used repo packages or tarballs will have an impact too. In some cases you may need to add an overide to TKLBAM (as also discussed in the above thread).

Bottom line is the best way to be sure is to test it. Install a TKL v11.0RC Joomla appliance to a VM (personally I like to use VirtualBox for local testing but VMware Server is not a bad option for a Win Server environment). Then do your TKLBAM backup and migrate to your testing VM and see how it goes.

Alon Swartz's picture

After this was reported, I looked into the issue. It turns out that the moodle deb package available upstream is not compatible with php 5.3, which is the default in Lucid.

The only workaround is to downgrade to php 5.2 from karmic, and pin the related packages so they don't get upgraded. I really didn't like this option, and seeing as we were considering creating a Moodle 2 appliance anyway, we decided to make the move.

So, I re-created the moodle appliance completely, from scratch, using the Moodle 2 upstream tarball. I am very pleased with the outcome as well as the improvements that went into Moodle 2 - can't wait to push it out with the upcoming 11.0 release.

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