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[Aaron Wells <1519516@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Filed a related bug 1519519 for the idea of putting in a sanity check to
warn users off of this practice.

In the meantime, I think I'm just going to tackle this with this
approach:

1. Make sure our official upgrade documentation is not telling people to
upgrade by copying over their existing installation.

2. Rename the methods in the multiplerecipientnotification module so
that they don't conflict with the names of the methods in the old
artefact.

I think if I do #2 above, then there probably won't be any problems
caused by the old artefact. The files will be there, and they'll still
be loaded whenever you load up an artefact, but we won't actually use
them for anything.

Though I will have to check and make sure that the artefact doesn't have
any crons or event handlers that might be getting triggered as well.

** Description changed:

  I've now encountered two users on the support forums who had issues
  upgrading because they had copied over their existing Mahara site, and
  now have duplicate methods defined in the (old) multirecipient artefact
  plugin and the (new) multirecipient module plugin:
  
  https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7438&offset=0&limit=10#post29970
  
  https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7444&offset=0&limit=10#post29986
  
  This was caused because in Bug 1468156, we refactored this plugin from
  an artefact to a module. Apparently some users upgrade their sites
  through this process:
  
  1. Download & unzip the new release
  2. Copy the release into their existing Mahara webroot
  3. When prompted, replace existing files in the webroot with new versions from the zip.
  
  The problem is this leaves the old files in place. Thus far, this
  approach has not caused any crashes, though I imagine it might lead to
  some strange behaviors, like possibly extra CSS files getting loaded,
  and the redundant ContactInfo block still being around. But the
  multirecipient module is perhaps the first case of us moving a library
  file from one location to another, and that results in the user having
- two library files that define some methods with the same name, and
- that's a problem in Mahara.
+ two library files that define some methods with the same name, and that
+ causes a fatal PHP error.
  
  Since this has been common enough to come up twice in the forum, it
  would probably be a good idea to address it somehow.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1519516

Title:
  Upgrade to 15.10 fails for sites that have upgraded Mahara by copying
  over their existing installation

Status in Mahara:
  In Progress
Status in Mahara 15.10 series:
  Confirmed
Status in Mahara 16.04 series:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  I've now encountered two users on the support forums who had issues
  upgrading because they had copied over their existing Mahara site, and
  now have duplicate methods defined in the (old) multirecipient
  artefact plugin and the (new) multirecipient module plugin:

  https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7438&offset=0&limit=10#post29970

  https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7444&offset=0&limit=10#post29986

  This was caused because in Bug 1468156, we refactored this plugin from
  an artefact to a module. Apparently some users upgrade their sites
  through this process:

  1. Download & unzip the new release
  2. Copy the release into their existing Mahara webroot
  3. When prompted, replace existing files in the webroot with new versions from the zip.

  The problem is this leaves the old files in place. Thus far, this
  approach has not caused any crashes, though I imagine it might lead to
  some strange behaviors, like possibly extra CSS files getting loaded,
  and the redundant ContactInfo block still being around. But the
  multirecipient module is perhaps the first case of us moving a library
  file from one location to another, and that results in the user having
  two library files that define some methods with the same name, and
  that causes a fatal PHP error.

  Since this has been common enough to come up twice in the forum, it
  would probably be a good idea to address it somehow.

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