upgrade path for distributions

[Stephen Gran]

Hi all,

I've been looking at the freeradius 2.0pre versions, and first, I want
to say nice work.  The new features look wonderful.

I'm a little concerned about the upgrade path for distributions, though,
and I wanted to raise it as an issue for consideration.  I am fully
aware that it may be unfixable.  It appears now that a 1.x config file
will not be parsed by a 2.x server, and you'll be left with a
non-functioning radius service after an upgrade.

This makes me feel like the right upgrade path for distributions is to
ship the new version as freeradius2 (complete with /etc/freeradius2,
/usr/sbin/freeradius2, and so on).  This would allow admins to coinstall
the two versions, and plan an orderly migration, rather than just break
the existing setup.

As you can imagine, this introduces quite a bit of divergence that I
really do not want to add.  It also means that we will have to ship the
last version of freeradius 1.x code to provide an upgrade path, which
means maintaining 2 code bases instead of one for the next several
years, which I also really don't want to do.  (Not that freeradius is in
general a difficult package to maintain - thanks to everyone for a
stable and secure server).

I'm just hoping to put the issue on people's radar if it is able to be
worked around.  If it's not, then I'll just bite the bullet and make the
divergence, but I was really hoping not to.

Thanks all,
-- 
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|  Stephen Gran                  | All science is either physics or stamp  |
|  steve at lobefin.net             | collecting.   -- Ernest Rutherford      |
|  http://www.lobefin.net/~steve |                                         |
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