[Users] Upgrades (was: Troubles with claws-mail 3.8 upgrade)

[Slavko]

Hi,

Dňa Sun, 20 May 2012 09:43:22 +0100 Paul <claws at thewildbeast.co.uk>
napísal:

> In my opinion, you should always upgrade when a new version is
> released. This is self-evident though - it we didn't think that then
> we wouldn't have any reason to do new releases.
> 

it depends...

IMO, the new release isn't real reason to upgrade. It depends what is new
in this release and what are these news related to my needing. Here i want
point something general, not only CM related things:

* security bugfix - i always upgrade it
* standard bugfix - upgrade depends on my usage of the fixed funkcionality
* new function    - the upgrade depends on my waiting of this function

The new releases often introduces some changes. Sometime the changes are
not related to users, sometime only user interface is changed and sometime
are changes related to configuration and on upgrade the user's intervention
is needed. And finally, to i am complete, new releases sometime introduces
new bugs too :-)

In company, where i am the IT specialist (only one), are new app versions
implemented only after carefully studying and testing what are changes.
Maintaining changes on near 100 computers (heterogenous environment, from
Win98, across Win7, to Linux) is not hard, but it is time consuming,
specially, if introduced changes expect some manual intervention.

In these day more and more projects are going to timed release schema. The
new release is not always a synonym to the new or better funkcionality and
sometime it (from user's view) seems that only version number was
changed :-D

By this, from my point of view, releasing the new version is not always a
reason to upgrade, but it can be. Of course, upgrades can help, but can
introduce problems too. Then the generalization, that releasing the new
version is reason to upgrade is not always right...

Finally, beside new functions, if there are users, which are impatient
waiting to new release, it can be signal, that something is not OK in this
software.

And now the CM related part. I am on the Debian testing (at home), then
upgrades are coming regularly and often and not only for CM. CM meets all
what i need, then i do not need to be impatient for new releases. But
upgrading to the new relases, which are incoming to debian's repo (thanks
to Ricardo ;-) was always without any problems for me. Then i can tell,
that CM is carefully maintained and released and releasing the new version
of CM seems to be safe to upgrade...

regards


-- 
Slavko
http://slavino.sk
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