WP updating policy

Hi,

lately I have begun to be a tad enervated by the recent WP updating mores.

I usually try very hard to avoid software which gets updated more often than once a year. I’m not talking of very occasional bugfixes or security fixes, I mean versioned updates.

I’ve noticed over the past 1-2 years that the “chasing updates”, versioned updates which practically crowd each others’ heels, have begun to infect one OSS after the other, with some (like Joomla) being updated at times twice a month. And now it seems to have hit WP too.

I started a few new blogs, customizing and working on them, not so long ago, using flavor 2.0.0 – and now, but a short time later, we already are at 2.0.3 waiting for 2.0.4. Already 2.0.0 had a couple of grave troubles, I hear and read trouble-only about 2.0.3 (and in fact I haven’t updated any blog so far past 2.0.2 due that) and it starts to be the same neverending story that Joomla has going now.

I’m sorry, but I don’t perceive this as such a positive thing, as some might do. In my book either a software is at a dependable height of development at a given time which truly values a new version, or it isn’t. I’ve not even yet made up my mind whether or not 2.0.0 truly was a worthy and dependable step at the time it was taken. I’m much less convinced of 2.0.3.

While some bug-hunting can be expected to have to be undertaken by users, it shouldn’t take the dimensions of Microsoft’s usual mores.

What I actually would expect is only important, solid releases and an acceptable spacing on the timeline. Bug or security fixes should truly be only this and not result in such enormous changes that the complete system is affected.

And most important: installing a CMS software should – above all – not replace one dependancy on a webmaster with another one. To be more precise, if formerly users had to contact their webmasters with each update of content, they lately seem to have to contact them for software updates just as often. This negates the very reason why people choose CMS in the first place.