My update to 1.5.0.beta8 today failed (I think it was when I attempted the upgrade from the web interface) because discourse-details, which I had in my plugins, was not empty. It looks like this means that discourse-details moved into discourse proper, so my adding it as a plugin was superfluous and detrimental.
The error I got was
fatal: destination path 'discourse-details' already exists and is not an empty directory.
If you get this, you need to edit app.yml and remove your discourse-details line.
On a related note, when there is an update that requires doing a cd /var/discourse; git pull; ./launcher rebuilt app it would be nice to Normal People if the web interface said so rather than thinking they’ll make sense of “so and so needs updating” (I can’t remember the exact words). Perhaps there is a way to catch that error and provide some more helpful error than (paraphrase) “something went wrong, but it could have been several somethings.”
OTOH, it may be the case that discourse is always so hard to administer that the people who do administer it don’t need such coddling.
It sort of seems like that ./launcher rebuild app is always the safest way to do an update and probably easier than a bunch of web clicks anyway. Perhaps that’ll change as discourse gets more stable; when I started using Linux every kernel update required all new binaries. . . .