Today, I’m upgrading micro.orient-lodge.com to the latest version of Laconica. Given the frequent updates to the core, I figured I needed to come up with a better way of doing these upgrades, so I’ve split my tarball into two different pieces. laconicadepends.tar.gz and laconica044.tar.gz.

The laconicadepends tarball are all of those little files, that you would normally install using PEAR or by hunting around that laconica depends on. The second tarball is a straight tarball of the current darcs repository. In theory, you should be able to combine the depends tarball with just about any standard repository to have a version that runs on many shared hosts. If you do set up a site using this, let me know how it goes.

Note: I had to update the XMPP code in the depends file.

Since I had been running an existing installation, I simply saved my old install, and then copied the .htaccess file, config.php, the avatars directory and my custom theme to the new directory. I will need to do a few other tweaks to make sure that the update is working with my fixes that never made it into the main version. It will give me a good opportunity to work on submitting patches to Laconica.

The first fix that I needed to do was to update the .htaccess file. Here is the patch description I made:

This patch is based on a dent from Dewald Pretorious to get the
htaccess.sample file to work properly for fancy URLs for various people
whom I believe were running Apache 2 and had problems.

Essentially, it changes all occurances of (\w+) and (\d+) to ([^/.])

I made this patch on the shared host, only to find that that instance of darcs does not permit me to send out changes. However, others should be able to get the changes from my darcs repository, http://www.orient-lodge.com/repos/laconica

I made the same change on my Ubuntu based box and managed to send a copy of the patch both to myself as well as to Evan.

Now, onto a few other patches.

Update: I've added my patches to for favicon.ico support and Google Analytics support. They should be in the tarball and in the darcs repository. The mail patch that I wrote needs to be changed to reflect changes in the way laconi.ca handles sending mail.