I really don’t think we need a feature to send an email in that case. Maybe we could show release notes when the OS version is actually updated via a package update, but that would happen separately.
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Email!? We don’t have to annoy users. We don’t have to keep trying to figure out a new way to annoy them.
Aren’t point releases just bug fixes? Outside chance something weird happens. I’ve never seen this behavior for Debian.
I’m on another forum where point releases are important only because a problem someone is complaining about may have been taken care of so we need to know that everyone is at the latest version. Same as ‘all packages up to date’ here.
Edit. Just checked. I’m at Debian 11.11 on my server. Never knew. Never needed to know.
User will see a reboot request I’m pretty sure as its normally a kernel update. So maybe a note why the reboot is needed, I can’t remember if that already happening.
Kernel update is orthogonal to the OS minor version change. A new release probably does include a new kernel, but you could have a dozen kernel updates in between OS releases.
And, kernel is pretty much the only thing that requires a reboot (when convenient), AFAIK. But, it’s not up to us when that flag gets set. It’s your OS that determines that state.
We don’t. But some users just enjoy being annoyed, so Jamie added a nice feature for that in Webmin – check out “Webmin ⇾ Webmin Actions Log / Email notification.”
Jamie, this is exactly the problem and why I was skeptical about the change in the first place. Now, the key questions are—where should we place it, and more importantly, how will we track the OS change and signal that an upgrade has occurred for this now separate feature?
That’s actually a really hard problem, because presumably every distro has it’s own definition of what an OS version update is and where the release notes are stored. And arguably this isn’t really our problem at all, it’s up the the OS vendor to inform users about changes in a new version. So we shouldn’t contort Webmin OS detection updates into a mechanism for detecting OS upgrades.
I like the suggested wording on the button
Dismiss Notification
as its much better and clearer than
Confirm Detected Changes
or even a hybrid
Confirm Detected Changes, click to dismiss
if the whole detected aspect is considered important (to me its not)
or even
Dismiss this informational message
We agreed that it would be applied automatically, without any notifications during minor OS upgrades.
This is what we currently do, and it works generally well for most of the distros we support in Virtualmin. Still, I believe, it might be seen as either an indirect responsibility or simply a nice-to-have feature to notify users about updates.
Jamie, please change it so that it’s not shown during minor OS upgrades and gets updated automatically, as Joe suggested. And, I’ll take care of the release notes, ensuring they’re always displayed as a small icon next to the OS name and version on the dashboard. Agreed?
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Sounds good, I’ll work on this!
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Just to confirm, how minor is minor enough to automatically apply an update? Like Rocky 8.5.1 to 8.5.2 seems safe, but would 8.5 to 8.6 also be OK?
For EL, all versions within a major version are compatible (binary, config locations, package versions). 8.1 through 8.x is a minor version change, we can rely on it to make no changes that effect the user or any software running on it. That’s what people pay Red Hat for, that assurance (and we get it for free in Rocky/Alma and other EL versions as a side effect, though it’s probably slightly less assured than RHEL). Going to 9 is a major version change.
For Ubuntu, all 24.04.x versions are functionally the same, as far as we’re concerned, but 24.10.x is not (and is not an LTS release).
For Debian, major versions are what matter. I don’t know if they even have versions for updates there. So, Debian 11 is always Debian 11, AFAIK. Even if they have minor versions, any major version should be treated the same by us/Webmin.
I’ve been using Debian since the demise of Mandrake/Mandriva. (8/2011) I’ve been pretty much oblivious to point upgrades.
There is no 8.5.1—Rocky and Debian use two-part versioning; minor updates (e.g., 8.5 → 8.6, and 12.3 →12.4 ) are backward-compatible, and safe for auto-updates; Ubuntu LTS gets point releases (e.g., 24.04.1 → 24.04.2) with security fixes, also safe for auto-updates.
Ok, the latest commits should allow these kinds of upgrades
Thanks! I will provide feedback on that change.