Out of interest how many people contribute to ESPHome … looking at the logs it looks as though there is around 30 to 50 people contributing some 100 line items on this months releases … in an enthusiastic community, people cross-over both ways between being both a user and developer.
Having seen how community projects work, where people give time and knowledge freely, the main priority is keeping everybody happy and sweeping up multiple, separate and distinct work streams into some regular release routine. The major headache of running community projects is managing outside interests/ pressure and keeping the community motivated, heard and happy!
Of course my paid job, is totally different! We fired somebody if they didn’t make the customer happy!
If you have time to write a book about how you feel things should be done, then you have time to read the the update release notes. 9 times out of 10 they won’t even apply to you. They’re for specific integrations or components. If what’s being update doesn’t apply to that esp board then don’t do the update, skip it. You making this post and ranting could have been avoided if only you had made an effort to read what the updates are and common sense would have kicked in. " oh! These don’t apply to my esp board so I don’t need it."
Just to chime in here - I was on the quarterly update cycle but found out the hard way that there had been deprecations and breaking changes in the-between-versions so when applying the quarterly patch all broke and I had to browse through all the release notes to try to find out what’s changed.
Now I just update when a new version is out and only have to check one release notes each time.
What you aren’t grasping here is that there is no problem. Regular updates are a good thing, except in your head.
I’ve said this already… it’s falling on deaf ears.
In ESPhome? I have been using it for years on many devices and there have been VERY FEW times where I needed to change code in order for the device to continue working on the new version.
I’m happy for you.
The changes to ili9341 introduced in 2023.3 and climate away in 2023.5 cause me some head-ache when moving from 2022.12 to 2023.7 and took me some time back-trace. That’s why I’ve stopped skipping and just move on with every update.
And that particular breaking change for the ili9341 that you use(d) would “hit” you ether way.
Same here. Over 100 esphome nodes using it since back in the days it was still called esphomeyaml/bin
I hardly remember any breaking changes - only one that the measurement_time was obsolete for the bh1750 brightness sensor - but it was so gracefully done that the compile actually told me just to get rid of this line.
Most breaking changes are usually around the HA side of things from my mileage - best thing is to keep parity between HA and ESPHome versions.
That’s indeed quite a stretch - specially for HA releases. Reading all intermediate change log obviously is mandatory if you don’t want to have surprises. Personally I try to update at least every 2-3 months to don’t have huge backlog to take care of.
ESPHome? Are you sure? Your device with display had a breaking change… but the rest? Might have been the HA upgrade over 7 versions that broke things?
Is there a way to tell if the release cycle is done? I would like to update once a month when all minor releases have been done.
Now the latest is 2023.10.1. Should I take the update or will there be a 2023.10.2 or even .3 (or .4…).
Would be nice to get some kind of hint when there will (probably) be no more minor updates for the current major release.
This is what I believe should be offered as an option in the UI–only notify when a final YYYY.MM.xx release is out, rather than users needing to manually ignore updates.
I don’t know why so many people are twisting my words to defend their own ideology around updates, when my requested addition would not prevent them from continuing to operate their own homes the way they see fit. It’s a quality of life improvement to the user experience, not a change in the way ESPHome itself is updated or the pace of the updates.
Regular? Yes.
Four of them in 2 weeks? That EACH spawn TENS of new updates affecting LOTS of devices? That EACH may take HOURS to update, if one wants to be up to date? NO!
And let’s not start talking about our heads here; you don’t seem to be an authority.
If I “wrote a book” then asking me to read release notes is like asking me to read Encyclopedias!
We, the users that have some life outside of HA/ESPHome, do NOT know all the terminology/libraries/components used in each of the integration/components/modules/boards so we can NOT know if most things apply to our setup.
“What you aren’t grasping here is that there is no problem. Regular updates are a good thing, except in your head.”
Two things:
At no time have I said that regular updates are not a good thing. Kindly refrain from claiming to understand what is my head, and do not invent things that I never said.
Just because something is not a problem for you does not mean the problem does not exist. Suggesting otherwise is disrespectful, and contributes heavily to a gaslighting tone in your comments.
As has been stated here multiple times- turn off the firmware entity and you won’t see the updates on the Home Assistant settings page. You will see the “Update Available” on the ESPHome Dashboard.
Is there some way to specify a version I want to update to, other than last?
Maybe I could wait until there’s a new major then update to the previous version, to have the bug fixes from the previous major, then wait through all the minors until there’s a new major, and so on.
I don’t see where I might do that and a search through the forum didn’t come up with an answer.
Don’t know. I don’t update every one of my 65 devices with minor updates. Just a few that are easily accessible on my desktop (in case something goes wrong).
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I do update the Integration with every minor release.
As I edit some devices they will be compiled with the latest version. If I add new devices, they will get the latest version. But for those devices that don’t need an update, I ignore them.
I usually do update all my devices when there is a major version release. Not all at once, just a few at a time. I don’t trust “update all” because I have had a couple of devices brick during the update requiring a UART connection to flash it.
Esphome releases their new monthly updates on the third Wednesday of the month. If you update to the latest point release on the Tuesday before that, you will likely be on the most stable version possible for that month.
That’s useful to know; thank you Steven.
Unfortunately that makes me feel like there’s no reason to think all/most bugs have been fixed before the “monthly update” as bugs don’t really get fixed on a schedule, AFAIK.
But I think you did put it right, as “the most stable version possible for that month”
I do wish there was a way to choose specific releases though.
Personally I try to update at least every 2-3 months to don’t have huge backlog to take care of. 
