Upgrading JSMF code vs. reinstalling

Hi Wolverine,

I just installed 2.0RC1. Congratulations on a great job. It feels solid and is much appreciated.

A while back we had been talking about upgrading vs. reinstalling. At the time I was investigating the possibility of copying in the new .php files without having to remove/reinstall. In cases where the database and the patch logic have not been changed, it seems OK to (very carefully, at my own risk, unsupported, etc.) copy over the new .php and .xml files.

Anyway, you had asked me what work was involved in re-installing, and I couldn't really give you an answer at the time. I took a few notes this time, and can now answer the question. I'm certainly not complaining. This is mostly to document the process, and see if there are any suggestions for making it go more smoothly the next time I have to do it. It also explains why I am willing to consider the manually-copy-in-the-new-files approach where it is appropriate.

I have multiple menus that link to the forum. The menu items must be re-created and relevant parameters set up.
If there are external (hard-coded Itemid=123) links to the forum using menu IDs, I either need to change all of them, or manually tweak the new menu item ids back to the old IDs, and reset the settings in #_jsmf_config.
If I have conflicting local changes to the patched files, I need to remove them, patch via jsmf, and re-edit.
Have to re-install discussbot and reset parameters.
Have to re-create recent_topics modules (in multiple places), and restore module settings.

In the latest re-install, I first reinstalled on a staging server, which made it easier to copy parameter settings to the new version, since the old version was accessible.

Do you have any thoughts on whether 2.0 might be upgradeable from 2.0RC1 with a file copy when it comes out ?

Many thanks,
Patrick Johnson