While the packages were downloading, I noticed a few coming from universe, but fewer than I had expected. I try not to use universe stuff on my mission-critical server, but some things are just too good to live without. Perhaps they’re candidates for main inclusion?

So, here’s some of the universe stuff I can’t live without on my server, excluding supporting libraries:

• collectd: Totally awesome “just works” system information collection and graphing tool. No more dicking around with nightmare configuration of Cacti and friends — collectd comes with a bunch of useful and sensible plugins that are ready-to-go for common graphing tasks. collectd has a vote of confidence from the Red Hat Emerging Technology folks, so you know it’s good.
• libapache2-redirtoservname: Convenience module for making sure you’re always redirecting to the primary domain name for your websites — with only one line in your VirtualHost configuration. Here’s how easy it is to use:

  ServerName bethesignal.org
  ServerAlias www.bethesignal.org perkypants.org www.perkypants.org
  RedirectToServerName On

• rtorrent: Simply the best terminal-based torrent client.
• php5-xcache: Opcode caching for PHP. Handy when running lots of PHP gash.
• mailgraph: Lets me know how much spam I’m killing, and email I’m suffering. See mailgraph on gnome.org for a great example of mailgraph in action.

Given the feature list for WordPress 2.3 and the very strong warnings that came with every pre-release, I figured I should actually test this upgrade before going live.

So I did my usual process of importing the tarball into my bzr branch of mainline and merging with my customised perkypants.org branch (I really ought to document this some time — using bzr is such a massive time-saver!), but this time I did a trial upgrade on my local web server instead of pushing directly to the production site.

I ran the database upgrade script. Uneventful.

The category page included a conversion tool to switch categories to tags. I’ve been using categories as if they were tags for a while now, so I converted a whole bunch. Uneventful.

All my plugins were compatible, though I removed one in favour of the internal canonical permalinks support. Uneventful.

At this point I decided to push to the production server and migrate the other WordPress sites I administer, Pia’s blog and the Liberty Theatre blog. Uneventful.

So, does this mean I regard the WordPress 2.3 release as uneventful?

No way, it’s totally sweet! Another great incremental release with lots of under-the-bonnet improvements. I particularly like the Atom feed and publishing support (though I do wish the WP hackers would bite the bullet and switch to Atom by default — I like Internet standards more than Internet soap operas).

But the upgrade was blissfully uneventful.

Thanks again, WordPress hackers!