Redmine

Hi,
I inherited an oldish Redmine installation based on Turnkey-Redmine.

The current Redmine version is "Redmine 1.2.1.stable (MySQL)".

root@redmine ~# /var/www/railsapp/script/about 
About your application's environment
Ruby version              1.8.7 (i686-linux)
RubyGems version          1.3.7
Rack version              1.1.1
Rails version             2.3.11
Active Record version     2.3.11
Active Resource version   2.3.11
Action Mailer version     2.3.11
Active Support version    2.3.11
Edge Rails revision       unknown
Application root          /var/www/railsapp
Environment               development
Database adapter          mysql
Database schema version   0

About your Redmine plugins
Basic project file loader for Redmine   0.0.11
Redmine Newissuealerts plugin           0.0.2
DMSF                                    1.2.2
Redmine Better Gantt Chart plugin       0.6.0

AFAIK the only "important" plugin is DMSF.

The need is to use Redmine to support our HW/SW development projects.
In order to do so we need to setup rather complex "projects" that include several Subprojects, Documentation Hyerarchy, SCM, assign a Project Manager and several working teams to the various subprojects.

This is a very long job my boss wants me to automate to some degree.

A first step could be done by copying a "standard" project and hand-modifying it, but I see no way of doing a "deep copy" of a whole project. Did I miss something obvious? Is there some way of doing it?

I then tried to use REST API to fully automatize the process.
Unfortunately it seems the version of Redmine I have has very limited REST capabilities. In particular no trackers, no membership and no group handling. Again, if I missed something please correct me.

This brings us to the main question: I tried to upgrade my installation (a clone of my installation, of course) using several different upgrade paths, including complete re-installation using either BitNami or Turnkey canned stacks (I sincerely know too little about Ruby, Rails, rake, gem and the like to attempt a bare-metal installation). I always failed for one reason or another.

Major stumbling blocks have been:
DMSF installation (is it compatible with RM 2.x? it would seem so, but I was unable to make it work).
Restore of current database to the new installation (apparently it goes ok, but I then get "internal error" when I try to connect).

Can someone, pretty please, point me to some detailed (i.e.: understandable for a complete dummy like me) HowTo guiding me to either upgrade my Redmine installation or move my data to a brand new installation? (which must include DMSF or equivalent!)

Thanks in Advance
Mauro