On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 07:39:26 AM The Wanderer wrote: > On 2021-08-17 at 13:36, Brian wrote: > > Of course! Do users not do this as a standard procedure? :) > > I don't - because I don't upgrade from one stable release to another; I > track testing, continuously, throughout the development cycle. As such, > there is no point in the release cycle at which it makes sense for me to > read the release notes; at the start of the release cycle they don't > exist yet, so there's nothing for me to read, and by the time they're > finalized and the release is ready, I'm already fully upgraded. > > It always bothers me to see "read the release notes!" hammered on as a > reasonable thing to expect users to do, in terms which presents users > who fail to do so as unreasonable. It probably does make sense in the > relatively limited (if also probably relatively common) case of > upgrading from (old)stable to stable, but it is certainly not so > universal a matter as to make failing to do it so inappropriate that > hammering on it in such absolute terms becomes appropriate. > > IMO, "fixing" an upgrade-related issue by documenting it in the release > notes is not *and cannot be* enough; it has to be fixed in the relevant > package(s), whether by making it not happen or by documenting it (and/or > pointing to a place where documentation of that specific issue can be > found) in a place which will be seen at the time when the upgrade is > performed. > > Also IMO, the cases in which it is reasonable to expect users to seek > out and read release notes before upgrading are quite limited; the > release notes are useful as reference documentation for potential issues > and for planning an upgrade if one wants to do that, but reading the > release notes is not an inherent part of the upgrade process, and any > design which assumes that it is or should be is IMO a broken design. > > (That latter is true for any product, not just for Debian.) > > At the very least, if you want to get people to read the release notes > before upgrading, you should arrange for the upgrade process to include > a prominent "have you read the release notes yet?" prompt (with an > option to cancel) before anything irrevocable is done. People could > still ignore that, but it would at least bring the idea of reading the > release notes into the actual upgrade procedure itself, rather than > being an out-of-band thing which people have to think of and go out of > their way to do manually before starting the upgrade.
+1 (to (almost?) everything written here (I'm not re-reading to confirm there are no exceptions) I especially like the idea of a prompt during the actual upgrade (or something similar). Aside: I have never (to the best of my recollection) done an upgrade from one version to the next, I install the new version on a clean disk (or new system) -- the only time I could envision doing an upgrade would be if stable became a rolling release. But, if I did do an upgrade from one version to the next, it would not surprise me if I forgot to read the upgrade notes. Hmm, why do I think that? I mean, I almost always read the instructions / manuals and such that I get for a new product, but maybe not if it is a replacement for an existing product which I think I know how to use. So, I guess I think that Debian is something I've used and already read the instructions (probably mostly as they existed ca. 2000 ;-) Things that have come up since I read the instructions, etc. around that time are typically things that I "bump" into.
