Migrating Custom pre-3.0.0 Metacat Properties to Site Properties?

[artntek]

For those who upgrade an existing metacat installation to the upcoming 3.0.0 release, how should we handle migration of existing custom metacat properties to the new site properties file?

Do we need to figure out a way to do this? Or can we expect the operator to re-perform a manual setup in the admin pages?

(anyone moving over to k8s would need to do manual setup via values.yaml)

[mbjones]

Can we create a simple utility shell script that can read from the old metacat.properties file, detect any properties that were changed from defaults, and then write those properties out into both formats needed (values.yaml and site properties) based on which the script user asks for?

[artntek]

I'd guess it would be a little too involved for a shell script, but yes, we could do it using Java or python etc. It's not a trivial amount of work to solve, code and test, which is the reason for my question above: should we add this to the 3.0.0 milestone, thus increasing the time to release? Or is it a "nice to have"?

My take is that we should probably make a tool available, but I defer to you and @taojing2002 on priority, since you both know what metacat installations are out there in the wild, and how much burden the Properties change might be to those operators (e.g. how comfortable they are reconfiguring or writing yaml etc). We could also do a "fast follow-up" release with this and some other low hanging fruit, soon after 3.0?

[mbjones]

I guess my take is that I would not delay release for this, but we should be clear to document what people need to do when upgrading.

[taojing2002]

It is a very useful feature since our production servers have some customized configuration. I can image it will be hard to make sure we don't lose some without a helper during the upgrade process. But still we can survive without it :)