Hello Monks,

I was recently hired to assume the maintainance function for the corporate website. The sole developer of the site has moved on and is thus unavailable.

Currently, I am tasked with a mandatory migration of the website from a FreeBSD server to a Solaris10 server, This, in and of itself, is not a problem. The problems arise due to the way the project was coded (and for lack of a better word, designed).

The site consists of several operational areas, with each of these areas residing in its own separate /cgi-bin directory. Here are the main problems:

• There are approximately 300 scripts, spread across several directories, and none of the scripts contains either of the lines:

  use strict;
  use warnings;
  [download]

• Code has been replicated for each operational area, and each common script has been modified to support the specific aspects of its corresponding functional area
• Subroutines that have been repeatly cut and pasted, and then further modified
• Paths and filenames have been hardcoded
• Some system/backtick calls will need need to tailored to Solaris10
• No unit tests are available

Does anyone have any sage advice or techniques that might mitigate the risk level of this migration?

What types of things can I do to facilitate future maintenance?

BTW: I did try to add use strict; to one of the scripts, but that was not extremely helpful (a gross understatement.)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.