Better management of my updates for HA

For context, I’m currently running HA Core 0.118.5 in a venv on Ubuntu.

I was considering updating my install today to 2020.12.1 - not for a fix, just because…
I’ve happened to stumble across a post in the forum indicating that a further release is planned for 23-Dec, so I’m intending now to wait for that release.

This got me thinking - currently I have updater setup and notifications configured to let me know when HA updates (and HACs related updates) are available.
However what I don’t have is an understanding of how to determine that further releases are planned / imminent, other than manually checking the GitHub repos for tags / releases / comments.

This all leads me to ask whether there is a viable way of building a sensor that tracks planned updates?
This would help me avoid upgrading my install a few days (or hours) before a new HA release occurs.

The release cycle is every 3 weeks, so every 3 weeks there will be a new major version. The release on 23 Dec is an exception.
Minor releases can’t be predicted, sometimes there are 2, sometimes 6, sometimes 3, deoends on how many bugs there are in the major version that get fixed before the next major version.

The release schedule just changed with the new versioning schema:

You are looking at our new versioning schema. From now on, the Home Assistant Core will be using calendar versioning, consisting of the year, month and a patch number to indicate a bug-fix release. This also means our release schedule is changing. Home Assistant Core will now be released every first Wednesday of the month!

@TazUk
I’d suggest just updating to the last patch release of the previous month, once the first relase of the current month is done.
That way you can avoid patching several times throughout a month.

Automation wise I think you can achieve that with curl to get the tags from the Home Assistant Core Repo and call the HA command line to update to a specific version.

Maybe worth a Feature Request to consider the last release of the last month as slow ring and the current month release as fast ring updates. :thinking:

The downside is, that if everyone would use the slow ring, there is no benefit in the fast ring and you just delay the patches by one month.
From developers point of view this is not desirable.

There’s actually a google calendar. Go to https://developers.home-assistant.io/ and you’ll see there’s a google calendar widget on the right side. You can add that calendar to your own google calendars and then get updates for events (including releases).

If you wanted to, could also use the Google Calendar Event integration to watch that calendar and then have HA automation trigger off of its events.

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Thanks for the info, didn’t note that.

That’s nice, didn’t know about this one, but why does it need to be a google calendar :roll_eyes: I try to avoid google like the plague.

I actually thought that was kind of weird too tbh. I’m guessing it was just easier since they wanted to display the events on the website and include a share link with minimal effort on their part, the gcal widget meets those criteria.

But the HA team has clearly been making an effort to reduce their reliance on google services throughout the product so maybe that’ll get an update at some point. I imagine its pretty low on their list of priorities though.

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Thanks for the responses - it’s apparent I haven’t expressed myself terribly well.

I understand the release cycle (both old and revised), and the unpredictable nature of point releases - I’m happy to update manually and to do so based on the currently released version, and comfortable enough with HA to rollback if / when necessary. This isn’t a post about the process of updating, nor the release cycle itself.

The scenario I’m trying to avoid is when I update to the most recent release, and within hours of doing so discover (through forums, github, etc) that another point release is in the works.

I already have sensors that tell me the current release and notify me accordingly - I’m trying to explore the possibility of having a way of monitoring planned / imminent patch releases.
I think from the sounds of things, the answer is probably not.

For me it doesn’t take 5 mins to update incl. restart of the server. Since around v 0.110 I started to update to beta releases as well, because the releases became extremly stable in my opiniom and it’s so easy to rollback if something doesn’t work.
Also you don’t need to care about point releases if everything is working for you.

Ah ok. Yea I’m not aware of a way to do that unfortunately. The calendar I linked only lists events for major releases, it doesn’t include patches. Also patch releases are basically created in response to issues identified in the release so the number and frequency is essentially unpredictable.

Only thing I can think of is if you want to set up something to watch the HA Core repo you could keep an eye out for any recently closed PRs with the label ‘cherry-picked’ or the creation of any new release tags. That’s how they do patches, everyone merges into dev and if an issue warrants a patch a tag gets created and commits get cherry-picked into it. But I don’t know how much advance notice you’ll get for that and whether its worth it, I’ve never paid too close attention to it.

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