I love Mint don’t get me wrong, but its been a little over a week since I last updated, and I actually find the updating process rather cumbersome.
How about releasing less frequent updates or perhaps a more intuitive update process.
Updates...Updates...Updates...
Well less frequent updates isn’t a good idea. If somethings amiss I’d rather a quick fix than a “Sorry I only release updates once a month on the 1st Wednesday of the month”.
tbh I don’t follow Shauns update instructions to the T. At the moment my sites are pretty quiet so I just drag and drop the update on top of the install without renaming any of the folders on the server. Works for me. YMMV.
Does it? I may do that.
I wsan’t after less frequent updates rather than patches, but maybe the software should be beta tested more thoroughly before it is released.
David, you are playing with fire doing that. That greatly increases the chances that someone visits mid-update. If an important file is missing or out of date during a record request (say mint.php or a Pepper class.php) you risk zapping your entire config and aggregate data. If you’re going to do it that way you should remove the Mint JavaScript include from your pages while you’re updating. You might miss a few hits but you don’t risk wiping everything. Just don’t forget to add it back in.
Nick, Mint is beta tested responsibly. There are just some bugs that only rear their ugly heads after being out in the wild and running on an insane variety of browser/server configurations.
This topic pops up every couple of months or so, but the update process isn’t going to change. What’s the alternative? Ask customers to patch Mint themselves with cryptic patch files? That would introduce more bugs than the updates fix (not that updates are just about bug fixes). If you are competent enough to want to patch Mint then I recommend diffing your installed Mint directory against the update and replacing only the updated files.
Shaun, I wasn’t attacking Mint, I think its a great product. I just find the updating process not very user friendly. Especially as I know many of my clients are using Mint for their stats. They are not web savvy and just won’t know what to do.
If you are aiming for web professionals and not lay people then you can get away with the update system as it is. Is there no way that Mint can update like it installs? One button clicks? Is there just no possibility of that?
I didn’t think you were attacking Mint. The upgrade process is about as user friendly as it’s going to get unfortunately. Fortunately, MInt is not targeted at “lay people” (but that doesn’t mean some are not buying it anyway).
One click auto-update has been explored but it’s just not possible given the state of PHP security on the vast majority of servers.
In an ideal world eh Shaun? :)
Nevermind, I’ll plod on and factor in costs to update clients mint.
Why can we not just drag the new app folder over the old one? Why do we need to rename?
Nevermind, I realise it could wreck the installation, no worries.
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