RFC: should we remind people to upgrade?

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Wed Dec 26 16:16:31 CST 2012


On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 01:43 +0100, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> Matt Mackall wrote, On 12/23/2012 09:31 PM:
> > Something like 30% of bug reports are from people running copies of
> > Mercurial that are a year old or more and who would benefit from
> > upgrading. Perhaps we should gently remind people that their copy is
> > getting stale.
> 
> I guess something could be achieved simply by rephrasing
> 
>    ** unknown exception encountered, please report by visiting
>    ** http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BugTracker
> 
> to something like
> 
>    ** unknown exception encountered, please
>    ** make sure you are using the latest Mercurial version, then
>    ** visit http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BugTracker to find
>    ** an existing bug report or file a new one
> 
> - and perhaps only show the bug tracker info if the Mercurial version is 
> sufficiently recent (and no external extensions are enabled).
> 
> Some automatic "please update" message might be fine, but the 6 months 
> grace perios seems a bit arbitrary. It could perhaps just as well be one 
> month or less.

I actually don't want to insist people update every month just for the
sake of being current. That's a lot of (distributed) work for very
little gain. If you're using 1.6.4 (Debian stable) or 1.4.3 (Ubuntu LTS
and RHEL 6) then great: you've spared yourself 20 updates and possibly
avoided some regressions and various headaches incurred by manually
installing packages.

But on the other hand, if something ISN'T working for a 1.x user today,
odds are high we've already fixed it, so a bit of forward pressure is
useful. The same won't be true of 2.3 for a while.

> It would perhaps also help if the bugtracker made it more easy to search 
> for closed issues.

Ugh, yes. Bugzilla tries to find duplicates when people file new issues,
but it's not terribly effective. And by default, closed bugs are
filtered in quick queries. Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to
Google useful information about a bug tracker, but if you can figure out
how to change the latter, I'd be interested.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.




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