Warn users of unsupported plugins in Release Notes (like NerdPack for 6.11.0)

[tropical b]

I posted my comment below.  Thanks for considering my feature request.  Appreciate @wgstarks suggesting I post it here! 👏

 

[thecode]

While my answer is not going to get likes, I don't think it is LT responsibility to add this to the release notes.

 

Note that Community App is not an official part of Unraid (although a very important one), in addition, users can install any plugin the want not only via the Community App.

You don't expect LT to test every release against all available plugins in the Community App and against every plugin you can find.

 

I can assure you there are plugins that exist now in the Community App which are not compatible or not fully compatible with Unraid 6.11, they are not yet used by people who upgraded to 6.11 so no one knows about it.

 

This is why there is a beta period which people can test and report bugs, you can also revert to the previous version anytime.

 

Specifically NerdPack was mentioned few times and there is an active issue in the developer GitHub, however he is probably busy with other stuff and did not address it leaving no option to deprecate it

 

I think a better suggestion would be an option to check in the Community App if you have an installed plugin that is not compatible to the new release so that people can first do this check and decide if they want to upgrade.

[mrpops2ko]

disagree with the method of communication but this seems mostly trivial for limetech to implement in practice

 

the real point of origin where a warning would be or should be issued, is on the clicking of the update button (as a secondary 'are you sure') style window

it doesn't strike me beyond the realms of computational possibility to parse a list of plugins already installed and spit out the ones which will be invalid

 

its at that point, the user can say 'nah i cant be bothered updating yet' because if its invalidating more plugins than the effort you plan to go to, and you are relatively happy as is, why bother?

 

the problem ultimately was that people felt blindsided - and overall should be a simple problem to fix

 

[thecode]

2 minutes ago, mrpops2ko said:

disagree with the method of communication but this seems mostly trivial for limetech to implement in practice

 

the real point of origin where a warning would be or should be issued, is on the clicking of the update button (as a secondary 'are you sure') style window

it doesn't strike me beyond the realms of computational possibility to parse a list of plugins already installed and spit out the ones which will be invalid

 

its at that point, the user can say 'nah i cant be bothered updating yet' because if its invalidating more plugins than the effort you plan to go to, and you are relatively happy as is, why bother?

 

the problem ultimately was that people felt blindsided - and overall should be a simple problem to fix

 

While you are correct it is possible to achieve this, this is not handled by LT.

Most of the users think they are responsible to deprecating the NerdPack plugin but this is not it is not correct, this was removed from Community App since it was not fixed by the owner, it has nothing to do with the OS upgrade.

 

What you are asking can be implemented within the Community App or another plugin that will do this checks before the update, but as I explained earlier LT does not know a plugin you have is going to stop working as they don't manage your Community App plugins and you can even install plugins from any source you want so no one will know they are going to break.

 

However I am trying to understand now how much efforts needed to bring this back and maybe I will maintain it to make everyone happy 🙂

 

[kizer]

5 hours ago, mrpops2ko said:

disagree with the method of communication but this seems mostly trivial for limetech to implement in practice

 

the real point of origin where a warning would be or should be issued, is on the clicking of the update button (as a secondary 'are you sure') style window

it doesn't strike me beyond the realms of computational possibility to parse a list of plugins already installed and spit out the ones which will be invalid

 

its at that point, the user can say 'nah i cant be bothered updating yet' because if its invalidating more plugins than the effort you plan to go to, and you are relatively happy as is, why bother?

 

the problem ultimately was that people felt blindsided - and overall should be a simple problem to fix

 

There is an upgrade assistant tool built in so you can click on it to look for known conflicts. It’s been built in for several versions. I personally use it every single update. Some might choose to roll the dice and not use it, but Limetech does try to be informative. 
 

 

 

[dnLL]

On 9/30/2022 at 1:45 PM, thecode said:

While my answer is not going to get likes, I don't think it is LT responsibility to add this to the release notes.

 

Note that Community App is not an official part of Unraid (although a very important one), in addition, users can install any plugin the want not only via the Community App.

You don't expect LT to test every release against all available plugins in the Community App and against every plugin you can find.

While I agree with this, the plugin was specifically marked as deprecrated on Community App (if I understand correctly). Maybe Community App could handle this better and warn the user about plugins that have not been updated since the last major version?

 

This is one more reason to add an option to run Unraid as a VM within Unraid. This is something I've been doing for a while, I paid an extra licence for it to run correctly and have 2 flash drives instead of 1, but it's been a life saver for me. While Unraid isn't exactly your typical "production-ready" operating system, many of us homelabers start with the smallest of project only to eventually host projects that people do rely on. Having a test VM to see what changed and especially to test plugins against the new Unraid version saved me precious hours of uptime on my main system. Anyways.

 

Hopefully this can be handled better in the future.

[tjb_altf4]

On 10/2/2022 at 5:54 AM, kizer said:

There is an upgrade assistant tool built in so you can click on it to look for known conflicts. It’s been built in for several versions. I personally use it every single update. Some might choose to roll the dice and not use it, but Limetech does try to be informative. 

This is actually part of the Fix Common Problems plugin, not the core Unraid OS.

In a perfect world, the check performed by upgrade assistant would happen as an integrated precursor to the upgrade process, rather than a separate check.

[Squid]

6 hours ago, dnLL said:

Maybe Community App could handle this better and warn the user about plugins that have not been updated since the last major version?

 

At the end of the day, most plugins do not actually require updates to maintain compatibility with OS versions.  NerdPack and a few others however did.  Whether or not a plugin has been updated recently does not imply that it does not work and there may be zero need for any further development or updates as time goes on.

 

All major plugins are constantly checked for compatibility, and Fix Common Problems does alert you to running incompatible / deprecated.  Apps itself when something needs attention has an "Action Centre" section that shows up when something needs you to do something.  Because Apps is far more prevalent than FCP, plans are to move certain tests from FCP to instead be part of Apps, but there are technical issues because of how Apps operates vs FCP