Why not upgrade? was (Re: [wp-hackers] Maintenance release, first gate of "is the issue major?")

[Lloyd D Budd]

On 10/5/06, Peter Westwood <peter.westwood at ftwr.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Wed, October 4, 2006 8:22 pm, Lloyd D Budd wrote:
> > This bug hunt is an awesome success and it is not over yet. While
> > going to sleep last night, I rememberd a lesson learned in similar
> > contexts. We probably should have been more conservative on what made
> > it into 2.0.5 .
> > http://trac.wordpress.org/query?milestone=2.0.5
> >
>
> Yes and no.  Most of those changes are very small.
>
> > Each of the fixes seem to stand on their own, but quantity of change
> > increases the risk of fault.
> >
>
> I disagree with this.  At work we have always striven for Maintenance
> releases to contain only low risk changes - i.e ones where we can see the
> bug and test the solution easily - rather than to keep maintenance
> releases small.
>
> > In the future, particularly at this "late" maintenance release and
> > where we are in 2.1 development cycle, lets consider the first gate to
> > be "is the issue major?"
> >
>
> In the future with the proposed 120day model we wouldn't need this
> maintenace release as we would already have released 2.1 months ago.
>
> > This is particularly relevant if you are interested in others such as
> > Debian distributing WordPress.
> >
> > I don't want to have a 2.0.6. I want us focus on releasing 2.1.
> >
>
> Agreed - In general though maintenance releases for WordPress are
> triggered by a security issue rather than anything else.
>
> I think we also need to be aware of the fact that in general our end-users
> don't always upgrade straight away and we need to understand why:
>
> It is because maintenace releases are difficult to upgrade to - Hopefully
> this is simplyfied by Mark, myself and others who provide diff files and
> instructions for generating them.
>
> It is because maintenace releases do not fix the issues that are most
> important to people - or don't contain enough fixes to be important - or
> we do not publish enough easily digestible information about the fixes to
> make people keen to upgrade - linking to the trac milestone for a release
> in the dev blog post probably doesn't help most of our users.
>
> It is because people are just too lazy - I can see from the small sample
> of users who have installed my Verson Check plugin that there are people
> out there still running 1.5.2/2.0.1/2.0.2/2.0.3 even with a big flashing
> warning  on every admin page!


Awesome. This is very important consideration.

Provide diff files: Unfortunately, don't image the impact is that
great as you are getting close to people that likely already have a
handle.

I think your work with Version Check plugin is very important and I
look forward to it or some variant being included in core.

I think it comes done to convenience. I think a nag to inform is an
important small step, but  any thing short of click to upgrade is
probably not going to be the medicine.

Thank you,
Lloyd