Introduction

The general idea is to treat a full migration as a series of controlled updates. In another words, upgrade or replace components of the Islandora Minimum Viable Functionality within the context of each milestone, and use its test mechanism to ensure the upgrade works.

• For instance, the most frequent releases come from Drupal (as of this writing release 7.38). That would be milestone 2. Once you perform the Drupal upgrade test that milestone by itself and all subsequent milestones, keeping every other component of the stack unchanged. Before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal.
• The next most frequent release upgrade is Islandora itself (in this case version 7.x-1.5), and for most cases it's backward compatible with older versions of Fedora (3.5, 3.6.2, 3.7.0, 3.8.1). That would be milestone 5 onwards. So again, before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal. Then proceed to the upgrade and testing of milestones 5 and 6.
• Although not required as often, you may then upgrade Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and prior versions to 14.04 LTS, and well as Java JDK 7 and prior to Java 8. Fedora 3.7.0 and all other components will already work with these new versions, so you might as well do the upgrades and test the whole software stack while still on fedora 3.7.0. You will necessarily need these new versions of Ubuntu and Java for Fedora 3.8.1 later on anyway.
• The least frequent new releases are that of Fedora Commons (as of this writing release 3.8.1). This is the most basic of all components of the solution stack it could be a little trickier, since it entails a true migration from the previous information on the MySQL database. Again, before starting the process be sure to do a tarball snapshot backup of Fedora, MySQL and Drupal, Then proceed to milestone 1 installation and testing, leaving all other components above alone. After that, move on to "fix" any outstanding issues with subsequent milestones, in the normal order.

Tested versions

Migrations