The Drupal 7 upgrade path

Late in the code sprint the last day of DrupalCON in Copenhagen, there was a lot of discussion going on about the upgrade path in Drupal 7. Questions of how to handle certain aspects of the process and prevent horrible flaming death when upgrading a site and its contrib modules. Upgrade processes, much like data migration, often become a sticky problem. Right now that stickiness has literally stuck the release of Drupal 7.