Dealing With List Server Upgrades

Like all commercial products, list servers are upgraded. When any product that allows customization, especially when its achieved through source code changes, is upgraded those with customized versions are faced with a choice. They can stay on an older version and possibly miss additional functionality provided by the new product, move to the new product and lose customized features or attempt to move all customized features into the new product, repeating some portion of the work that went into customizing the product.

When the user interface customization was limited to page headers and footers, upgrading was pretty simple. Each place a change was made, a standard comment identifying a customization was inserted. Standard code was not deleted but commented out. This made it easy to identify all changes and then to find the corresponding areas in the upgraded version. Unless the upgrade changed code that had been customized, copying in the customizations and commenting out the code which matched the commented out code from the previous version was a simple mechanical process.

When changes became more extensive and especially when they started to impact the actual functionality of the user interface it was not practical to keep the Perl user interface in sync with the current commercial version. Fortunately the core functionality of Lyris is provided by a compiled executable. The standard Perl user interface uses the Lyris API and sits on top of executable via the API. As long as the API is extended and calls to existing functions are not changed, and old version of the Perl user interface will continue to run with the new executable. Further, the largest user interface changes tend to be in the administrative portion. Since one Lyris executable supports multiple web sites, it's a simple matter to set up a virtual server, accessible only by system administrators, and run a completely standard and up to date user interface, including all the administrative functions.

This way, the only functionality that is missing for end users are new list viewing, sorting or searching options, provided in the upgraded Perl user interface. Such user interface changes are relatively infrequent. Since Lyris is a list server and used overwhelmingly by users via the email interface and only occasionally by a few users via the web interface, this limitation is not significant.

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