It has bugged me from the beginning of my use of Gramps that with each release, a fresh install has to be made. This means that you have to reinstall your database, filters and all of the plugins and addons. This may take hours of your time.
Would it be technically possible for a maintenance release only, a process be created to just download and install files that have changed since the last maintenance release? The process should be automated. For example: when a maintenance release is announced the user just needs to go to the main menu and select “update version”. The automated process goes out and downloads the files that has changed since local version and the latest version. If there is more than one maintenance release, it loops through until it reaches the current version. User will still need to manually download major and minor.
I think it would be great if the Addon Manager was made to see outdated version addon as upgrade opportunties instead of merely incompatibilities. Or if there were a Report that wrote an installer script based on the currently installed add-on plug-ins. Naturally, there would be some that cannot be installed with automation. (Such as those with prerequisites or thar were manual installs.)
But for Cistom Filters, you might want to consider using FilterParams by @kku to export sets of custom filters. It does not take very long to build a list of filters that is too big to navigate effectively. So building a catalog of offloaded filters is a way around that. (Hopefully, someone will build a filter organizer at some point. Or maybe not, since a Media Organizer is a more universal need and nobody has built one of those yet.)
Is this a Windows-specific problem? I use Fedora Linux and never experienced such a situation with the distro-provided packages. Of course, this means there is a time-lag between official Gramps release and package availability, but this is largely compensated by the DB being untouched.
Gramps source goes into a system Python library while user data is kept in user home directory.
Under W$, are source code and user data cleanly separated?
When I read the original post I was wondering the same thing. I, too, have run Fedora Linux and Gramps for years and never run into a situation like this.
Semver versioning is Major.Minor.Patch, and from what I’ve seen with Gramps, both Major and Minor version releases tend to be treated as major releases. So, in my experience what you describe happens with major and minor releases, but thankfully not with maintenance releases. Is that your observation too?
And @pgerlier brought up a good point about platform differences - I am on Windows. I did not realize that Linux users did not have to go through this pain. How about MacOS users?
I use Gramps on Windows and while I have to re-install addons after a feature upgrade release, like v5.x to v6.x, maintenance updates, like v6.0.n to v6.0.n+, require no changes. I simply make a backup (just in case), then run the installer. To date, I’ve never had to use the backup taken immediately prior to the update.
We use a similar versioning scheme to Semver where we have major, feature and maintenance releases. Maintenance releases share the same configuration and data directories. They are called gramps60 for the current release. This is possible because we only allow bug fixes in maintenance releases and there should be no changes to the database schema of structure of configuration files.
So a major release say ver 6.0 requires for me a full .deb install in it’s entirety with all the subsequent testing and configuration for my own use. Whether upgrading ver or not.
And a maintenance release say ver 6.0.1 would only require to install the files modified or created since 6.0
Installing the complete version over the top of a working copy does create problems
Understood. Is this not the same for Linux? I’m wondering why some earlier messages seem to imply that the issue of upgrading to newer Feature and Major releases does not manifest the issues described by the OP (migrating filters, preferences).
If there isn’t a list of things that get migrated with each (Major, Feature, Maintenance) release, it could be compiled from this thread.
I want to apologize for this post as for some reason I was off base due to previous experiences.
I’m on Windows11 and running 6.0.3
I just downloaded and installed 6.0.6 ( per all these discussions)
It created a new 6.0.6 folder and installed. It runs as 6.0.6 and I have all my filters and addons.
All I can say is that my experience must have been tied to major/minor releases which affected my experience. Sorry for the confusion, I still think Gramps is a great program. So in conclusion updating with a maintenance release is painless on a Windows OS.