Development on leihs 3.0 is soon finished, so we thought we could give you some information about the upgrade process if you are using leihs 2.9.x at the moment. The most important aspects:

1. leihs 3.0 runs on Ruby 1.9.3, Ruby 1.8 is no longer supported. So you will have to establish a server that can either host Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 applications side by side, or you will have to disable Ruby 1.8 and use only leihs 3.0 and Ruby 1.9.x.
2. You can run leihs 3.0 alphas/betas and 2.9.x side by side using the same database, but only until leihs 3.0.0 is final. This means you can run any alpha or beta release of leihs 3.0 with the exact same data and in tandem with your existing leihs 2.9.x installation, but you cannot run a release candidate (rc) or final version of leihs 3.0.0 with leihs 2.9.x data.
3. In your database.yml file, you will have to change the database adapter from “mysql” to “mysql2”.
4. “English US” is no longer supported. Instead, the language is mapped to “English UK”. All users who had “English US” selected as language will be migrated automatically to “English UK”. If you feel bad about this and want to have a US English version of leihs, feel free to submit a locale file (en_US/leihs.po) to us. The reasoning for us is so that we only have to support one English translation, not two. If someone else volunteers to maintain English US, that’s great.
5. config/application.rb is no longer necessary. Instead, these settings can now be made through the admin web interface. This means you can stop adapting and symlinking config/application.rb during deployment once you have upgraded to leihs 3.0. The very first time you deploy over an existing application.rb, all your settings will be read into the database from application.rb. Aftwards, you can safely delete application.rb from your deployment.
6. Sphinx is no longer necessary. If you’re not running an instance of leihs 2.9 on the same server, you can completely remove Sphinx from that machine. This also means you won’t need to reindex the database or restart the Sphinx server if it crashes. It has many other benefits, but more on that some other time.
7. node.js is no longer necessary on the server.
8. Cairo is no longer required on the server.

This may sound like many changes, but I hope you see that the system is getting easier to install, easier to maintain, more modern and less dependant on older packages. Managing a leihs 3.0 instance will cost you less time than managing a 2.9 one, and this is in addition to the huge interface improvements. We’re sure you’ll be very happy with the 3.0 release and we’re proud and looking forward to releasing the final this summer.