On 2021-08-17 at 13:36, Brian wrote: > On Tue 17 Aug 2021 at 16:00:57 +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: >> Do the update to Buster - take it as slow as you need to. Bring it >> bang up to date. >> >> For the Buster to Bullseye - >> >> READ RELEASE NOTES :) > > 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. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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