Home Assistant Supervisor Snapshot page changed without updating

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

This is not really a problem currently but very puzzling to me.

I am running HA core-2021.3.4 on Hassio 5.12 and haven’t upgraded in a couple months because I needed to work out some problems with the Sonoff integration in custom_components.

Much to my surprise the Supervisor page to create and download snapshots has changed I believe sometime in the last month. The new interface is working (although I liked the old one better) but I am somewhat concerned that it changed since I was intentionally NOT updating the base software.

I did add some new integrations, including Assistant Relay and HomeKit Controller, and updated my configuration.yaml for them. But can anyone explain what I did that caused this page to change without doing an update?

2

Supervisor autoupdate to version 2021.05.4, I guess.

3

Ugh. Yes that was probably it. After reading the YEARS old and still active thread about adding an option to disable Supervisor automatic updates I am going to have to seriously rethink my switch to Hassio. I installed it so that I could have an easy to maintain, stable, appliance-like system that just worked. If it is going to break due to some undesired automatic update that I can’t control when I am out of town traveling for 3 months I may have to go back to running it on a server I can fully maintain myself.

4

Did the update break anything or are you just uncomfortable it updated automatically?

5

The supervisor is updated automatically. You can’t control it.

6

But has the automatic update functionally broken anything?

7

Its never broken anything here.

1 Like
8

Just checking because I am in the testing phase of likely moving back to HA after being away for 2 years.

9

I’ve only been using it for four months and it has not broken anything yet. Before that I had HA installed Supervised on my own Rasperian system. I mostly treat it like a production system though. When I get a configuration that is working I don’t update anything I can avoid or is difficult to back out. Then every 3-6 months when I have time to read release notes and deal with possible problems I upgrade to current. I think that a pretty standard and reasonable approach.

For example this cycle I was using a community supported integration that would have broken if I upgraded core. And while it is not likely that a Supervisor upgrade would break it, I can’t rule it out either. Now that I have that resolved I’m going to start upgrading again. But when I travel in the back country and may not have Internet access for weeks at a time my philosophy becomes “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

I think it is perfectly reasonable for developers to say I’m not looking at problems unless they are on the current version. But except possibly for security updates, I do think it is unreasonable to FORCE upgrades without warning and a way to disable it.

Can you tell my job used to be to run mission-critical, high availability systems? :slight_smile:

/* end rant */

1 Like
10

Yes there is significant user concern over supervisor updating without any user control.

No, this is probably not going to change.

No, you don’t have to use supervisor.

11

The core breakage WAS a security update with a 5 month warning. to give developers time ti fix their code…

Since they gave adequate warning, should they have forced the core update?

12

Pain is sometimes the last resort and a great motivator

1 Like
13

It also helps weed out some abandoned integrations, I expect.

14

I’m not against mandatory updates to make code easier to maintain. Five months notice something will break for a security update is more than acceptable to me.

My issue with automatic updates is that I can no longer schedule them at a time when downtime will have the least impact and I have time to resolve them. If it’s really necessary I would prefer automatic updates to be optional but maybe have a sunset date built into the software that it stopped working six months after a new version is released or something that gave me a window of a few months. Or maybe just a dependency check for which versions of Core are “approved” to run with which versions of Supervisor.

In the end though I realize that it’s my choice to either use the software or not.

15

In other words, it is the lesser of evils.

I think if you looked closely at the current openHAB, for instance, you would see many advantages here.

16

Automatic updates of the supervisor haven’t yet caused me any downtime, so I think your concerns are overblown.

1 Like