FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

With Minetest still very much in heavy development, I'm curious to know how people who host public servers keep up-to-date without trashing their existing worlds. I guess to people who plan singleplayer or LAN games, like myself, this is just as applicable though.

I get that many new features "just work" once you update your binaries, but even on the singleplayer/local LAN side of things I've run into minor issues that could become huge issues for public servers where I can see many people have invested a lot of their time to build some wonderful things.

I've been able to use the farming mod which I understand is just the default now. I've seen new blocks that weren't in previous versions like copper, gold and mese crystals. I noted on a map yesterday that I was trying to find grass and couldn't (so that I could try to get wheat) and that reminded me that I think I had to edit minetest.conf to turn on jungle grass, if i hadn't done so already. Also on that map, I went mining but didn't come across any new blocks at all. It's possible I just didn't mine long or deep enough but I only ran into coal and iron. Is there a point at which a world is generated with just too old of a version of the engine to handle newer features?

From what I've seen most of the popular servers seem to be using the latest stable version so how do you keep up-to-date? How do you know what is going to work and what isn't? Do you run your world offline first on a test server? Or do you just update to the newest version and hope for the best? Has anyone ever done the unthinkable and just blown a world away and started anew (either using a seed or completely random new)? :O

Share your thoughts/experience if you please...

Copy the world + mods (for that world) into the newer stable. Run world. Any errors? Try to fix em.

Jordach wrote:Copy the world + mods (for that world) into the newer stable. Run world. Any errors? Try to fix em.

Well that was a short discussion. :) So it sounds like you've never had any significant problems when upgrading from one version to the next?

Darkbee wrote:

Jordach wrote:Copy the world + mods (for that world) into the newer stable. Run world. Any errors? Try to fix em.

Well that was a short discussion. :) So it sounds like you've never had any significant problems when upgrading from one version to the next?

I don't actually use many mods, as they're so stable it makes Obsidian look like sand.

I haven't ran into any significant problems upgrading.

I have, once. Specialties didn't like 0.4.7's farming, so I grabbed the 0.4.5 farming, and that worked fine. :-)