upgrading movabletype-opensource on debian/ubuntu
Since 2008, Debian has had a movabletype-opensource package available in the repository. That’s good news for people who like to make short work of system administration. Unfortunately, the package in the repository isn’t the very latest and greatest. Even so, there are big benefits to using aptitude to install movable type, the main one being that it automatically installs all the various dependencies and offloads your job (maintaining those packages) to someone else. Plus the file locations are well-thought-out. Rather than throwing everything right into the web root the package maintainer put the cgi files into a common cgi-bin folder, the shared files into /usr/shared, the perl modules into the shared perl library, and the configuration files into /etc.
Because I imagine I’ll be upgrading my install of MT from time to time, I wrote this script so I can be even more lazy in the future, and I’ll put it here in case anyone else wants to use it. It’s only been tested on a brand new Ubuntu 8.10 install and the MTOS-4.23-en.zip package.