
My organization has been using an unmanaged solution approach for our in-house customizations for the longest time, using one big solution which contains all customizations. Microsoft has been pushing the concept of using managed solutions for all downstream environments, and using solution segmentation. So we are looking into making the switch. For existing customizations, simply trying to import the managed solution after deleting the unmanaged one does not seem to work.
##[error]Solution import Failed. Error: A managed solution cannot
overwrite the EntityRelationshipRole component with
Id=1ae98e99-f14e-e911-a963-000d3ab6d103 which has an unmanaged base
instance. The most likely scenario for this error is that an unmanaged
solution has installed a new unmanaged EntityRelationshipRole component
on the target system, and now a managed solution from the same publisher
is trying to install that same EntityRelationshipRole component as
managed. This will cause an invalid layering of solutions on the target
system and is not allowed.
Other threads about this error say to delete and recreate the offending component in the destination instance. That approach doesn't seem possible for us though, as we're already in production for a long time. The error would probably appear for each and every component we have ever created. Is there no easy way to make the switch from unmanaged to managed for existing deployments?