Hi there,
It's a good question.
I can see you're posting in the 1.8.x/1.7.x section so addressing this first you should be able to just upgrade without changing the config as the 1.8.x config hasn't substantially changed for a number of years.
Should just be a case of:
- Back up existing ~/services and ~/anope-1.8*
- Download new anope-1.8.x.tar.gz
- Extract it
- cd into it, ./Config, make, make install
- Restart services and they should return on the new version.
For 1.9, it's completely different because it's still under heavy dev (hence why it's a dev branch) and changes can and do happen that make upgrades trickier but that's part of the price for using bleeding edge stuff where things do change.
I'd expect once 1.9 becomes 2.0 stable it will settle down to be similar to the 1.8 way of life so it's easy to move between.
In practice some people have re-packaged anope to be managed by something like apt/portage so they try and offer the functionality you're seeking but to be honest I've never seen any work particularly well since apt/portage tends to be system wide whereas traditionally irc software (on shell hosts etc) have multiple instances per server. Not always the case admittedly.