Upgrade issues

I am trying to upgrade from 2.0.6 to 2.2.6

Looking at the documentation the first thing it says is "So, BEFORE starting the upgrade process make sure all your packages are up to date, and working properly in 2.0.x" in red.

OK, fair dos.

Problem is, whichever package I try to upgrade I get an unhelpful package_download_err

so my questions are three;

Is 2.0.6 to 2.2.6 a sensible upgrade or will I (probability?) break my live site?

Why do I get the package_download_err, how do i find out what is going on, can I upgrade packages manually? (especially given that I have had a right run around with packages moving server before)

Would I be better off not upgrading? (I am having problems with access to images and files for my editor users)

Would I be better off installing from scratch and importing the database and config files?

I must confess to have a revisit of "Revolution enervation" that made me scurry back to Evolution for live sites and to Wordpress for all my new CMS. Sorry if that makes you less want to help, because I am grateful for any help.

I would make a backup of the full website and then proceed to upgrade to 2.2.6. Once the upgrade is finished you should definitely upgrade all of the packages. If you still have problems then you could have an issue with your server (curl or fsockopen disabled?)

You can manually upload and upgrade the packages if needed to get your site working again, or worst case restore that backup.

I would also disable all plugins before doing the upgrade (but after the backup). There are some plugins that could crash setup in your case.

Quote from: BobRay at Feb 09, 2013, 01:55 AM

I would also disable all plugins before doing the upgrade (but after the backup). There are some plugins that could crash setup in your case.

Could you share what plugins you have noticed causing issues during upgrades? I haven't had any major issues, but it would be good to know.

Good question. I only know of one for sure, and it's been fixed (it was one of mine -- ActivationEmail I think), but any plugin that acts on a save user event can potentially crash setup on an update that writes a user object (like the one that altered the hashing scheme) and any plugin that acts on a save resource event could crash setup on an update that alters resources (e.g., any update that alters the user table).

The problem is that when Setup is making those alterations, especially if it uses the processors, the events are sometimes fired, but the $modx->user and $modx->resource objects may not be set at that point. When the plugin tries to use them, an error can get thrown (especially if E_NOTICE is on) and errors in plugins can stop MODX in its tracks.

I've put in a feature request to prevent this, but I don't know if it's been acted on. Even if it has, it probably won't help for upgrades from older versions.

It only takes a minute or two to disable all the plugins by right-clicking on them in the tree, so that's what I usually do.