Re: Reading of release notes (was Re: Still on stretch, getting ready for bullseye)
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.
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