Upgrade rt3 from 3.6 to 3.8 in fedora core 9

I upgraded my RT install today using the version in rawhide bound to be release in Core 10. I had some trouble with the upgrade, and I want to share the solution with you:

First of all, your system will survive the upgrade just fine. Yum reported that it only needed to pull seven packages from rawhide, so there is nothing wrong with doing it. After the install, you would want to upgrade your database, as RT has changed quite a bit since 3.6. Now the rt-setup-database tool expects to find the upgrade files in the original source directory, with a file structure as ./etc/upgrade.

Fedora puts these files in /etc/rt3/upgrade, thus rt-setup-database –action upgrade will not be able to find the files. You need to go into /etc/rt3 and type the following:

# mkdir /etc/rt3/etc
# cd /etc/rt3/etc
# ln -s /etc/rt3/upgrade upgrade
# rt-setup-database –dba root –prompt-for-dba-password –action upgrade

Now follow the on-screen dialog and everything should work.

There’s a few customization tasks you could do afterwards, especially, I wanted to change the default stylesheet to the old one, as I find the new style horrible. Add the following to RT_SiteConfig.pm:

Set($WebDefaultStylesheet, ‘3.5-default’);