As much as I love taking advantage of new features upon the release of Home Assistant (yay, the Configurator!), the erase of an entire groups.yaml file (should have made a backup) prompts me to start a thread concerning a change of development of Home Assistant. Yes, I do appreciate a 2-week release cadence, but when introducing a major change or major new feature, sometimes things can go wrong and users of Home Assistant would have to figure out a way to get things to work. I know that release notes are there for a reason, but my thinking is that introducing a new feature that may seem broken probably should be left where a testing environment is used for testing new features before releasing a feature or major change to the Home Assistant community as a whole.
I know that new components will be released as part of 2-week release cycle every now and then and that technology changes so quickly, but wouldn’t it make sense to have three branches of releases such as Canary (dev release), Beta, and Stable similar to Google Chrome? Or would that be too much of a resource to manage three different branches?
Update I’ve read the thread here:
What people should do is to have a secondary server for testing purposes only and keep your production server’s Home Assistant version as it is until everything is working very well in the test system before deploying an upgrade to a production system. If testing involves USB devices of any kind, I would shut down the main Home Assistant production instance, unplug any devices from the production server, plug it into test server, fire up the testing instance of Home Assistant, do the testing, and switch back to the production system depending on whether things went well or not.
Even for the most advanced Linux users, people who are new to Home Assistant would treat it as an experimental software program for home automation. That is only my view and my opinion about Home Assistant.
With all that said, breaking changes does not mean I’ll simply stop using Home Assistant or stay at older versions until things are stable. I would definitely upgrade to the latest and the greatest no matter what it takes to get Home Assistant up and running and I won’t give up in that. But for those who want to stay one version behind, I 100% respect that and can’t blame them for not upgrading to the latest.