It took me until now to realize that there was a stable channel and that I need to edit the config to upgrade to it.
I see an upgrade option to 3.0.0.beta16 now for my sites. If I set to the stable release now and upgrade will it go to 3.0.0.beta16 and then eventually 3.0.0 stable?
Can you explain why you believe you need to swap to stable?
I’m not sure why one would ever need a reason to run stable software. I just want less updates and stable software.
I don’t think so. If you change to stable, you’ll only update to major releases, and 3.0.0 hasn’t been released yet. The last stable release was 2.8.0 (you can see latest updates in release-notes)
I don’t think Stephen was trying to be funny. Stable is used in a meaning of a keyword for app.yml, not as an English word. Reason being, the other (default) keyword, tests-passed can be described as stable too: it’s unlikely to be broken[1], and in fact, can be more “stable” (English-wise) if you update plugins and/or theme-components more frequently than you wish to update Discourse.
in my 2 years running Discourse, I’ve never had a situation when something was broken because of some fresh commit ↩︎
Thanks for the info! I know he wasn’t trying to be funny, it’s just wasn’t looking to discuss reasoning, just info on when to upgrade to move to stable. I’ll keep updating while it says and switch as soon as I see 3.0.0 hit stable.
Be aware that the release of the major release, AFAIK, on a tests-passed branch is accompanied by the release of n+1.beta1, so if you want to avoid the word “beta” in your version, you should switch to it just before updating to n+1.beta1.
Sometimes[1] the questions are formulated based on faulty assumptions, and it’s better to understand those early on.
one could argue quite often, if we deal with “please help” topics. this is IMHO based on discussions on my forum too ↩︎
So for instance I’m on 2.9.0.beta14 now. I should switch the branch in my config to stable and then just wait for 3.0.0 to show in my /admin section and it will only show updates to stable releases from that point on?
When I change the config file do I have to restart the docker container?
You can change the app.yml now. You’ll need to wait until the release to run another command line upgrade. It’s not clear how many more beta releases there will be before a new stable is released.
Stable means fewer updates, but not necessarily fewer bugs. It requires a bit more expertise to run stable than tests passed. Critical security updates do get included in stable, but ux issues are likely to remain broken until the next stable release. Third party plugins are less likely to work with the stable branch as it’s less well tested.
If you want fewer updates you can just update less frequently.
A good explanation of stable vs test-passed:
I must admit I do feel pressured and confused by the update notification in the admin page.
It is rather abrupt about telling me I should update immediately, but it tells me to update to beta software. It’s rather contradictory. I feel it should let the user know there’s an update, but only be pushing the user to update ASAP if there’s a security issue or critical bug in their current build.
Perhaps the beta tag could be removed if it is considered stable or change it to tests-passed so admins can feel more comfortable updating, knowing they’re getting fully tested and stable software.
Alternatively it could drop the beta tag and be called stable as that’s what I’m reading here, then the current stable release could be called LTS.
That is exactly what is going on, when a new beta comes out, there is (almost always) a serious security issue that triggers the new version.
Which would be a pretty good (better, IMO) way of looking at things indeed.