Upgrade Instructions advise skipping from Step 7 to 8, but then noclobber will foil the upgrade

Hi, I’m new here. Never opened an issue on GitHub before, ever. I skimmed the guidelines; apologies if I miss something.

I think I’m the guy who provided the impulse for the documentation enhancements in https://github.com/mattermost/docs/pull/4943. It looks MUCH better now (on the docs site), but I think there is still a small point to be corrected.

TL;DR: does the sentence from Step 7 ending in “you can jump to step 8 below.” need to disappear? I think if it doesn’t, lots of important stuff won’t be copied that should be.

Details:

I see in Step 7 the following:

Run ls on your Mattermost install directory to identify what default folders exist. If your folders match the structure specified in the following note, you can jump to step 8 below.

OK, cool, that is my situation.

And then Step 8 tells me:

The n (no-clobber) flag and trailing . on source are very important. The n (no-clobber) flag preserves existing configurations and logs in your installation path. The trailing . on source ensures all installation files are copied.

Umm, I don’t think that’s true. Since I didn’t erase anything (skipping from Step 7 to Step 8), the no-clobber flag will preserve the stuff the command is meant to copy into that directory.

I did a fast check by copying my existing mattermost installation into /tmp/mattermostclobberme and then adjusted the Step 8 instructions to simulate it with cp -an /tmp/mattermost-upgrade/. /tmp/mattermostclobberme/

Results of an ls -lh after that:

root:/tmp# ls -lh ./mattermost-upgrade/bin ./mattermostclobberme/bin
./mattermostclobberme/bin:
total 108M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mattermost mattermost  85M Jun 10 13:53 mattermost
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mattermost mattermost  21M Jan 13  2021 mmctl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mattermost mattermost 2.2M Jun 10 13:53 platform

./mattermost-upgrade/bin:
total 110M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 89M Jul 29 13:38 mattermost
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22M Jul  6 15:46 mmctl

We see, thanks to the timestamp on the files, that the cp -an command did not overwrite the mattermost binary in /tmp/mattermostclobberme/bin/, which leads me to believe that the hint in Step 7 about jumping to Step 8 is very counter-productive.

Thank you for reading my first-ever GitHub issue! 😃

[mrckndt]

@cwarnermm Yes, the find command is needed to wipe the old server and client components.

[cwarnermm]

@mrckndt @cliff1976 - These documentation corrections will be made via https://github.com/mattermost/docs/pull/4978