Is it only me or is anyone else getting more than a little annoyed at the requirement to update your ESPHome devices every time there is a HA update?
Are developers aware that the net result is I (and most likely many others) have virtually given up on ESPHome devices…WHY? they are way too demanding of my time these days.
Pity because most of these devices were my most treasured devices in the past…Absolutely NOT any longer. They are a liability and no longer an asset!
So you believe they should not do any more development or bug fixes except for critical issues???
Don’t update if they don’t need it. Go into the ESPHome integration then for each device that annoys you, disable the firmware sensor. Updates will pop no more!
Then of course it’s up to you to update if you feel it’s necessary. After reading all the release notes between the version you are running and the latest version of course.
But seriously - I have devices that haven’t been updated since 2023. They work fine, so far no security updates have forced them off the air.
I believe that a sensible way of doing this process is to build your updates and roll the all into a cumulative update bundle that you can then choose to release in an upcoming HA update when you (as the dev) think that now is the time.
Trust and believe, DO NOT UPDATE if the device is working as you need it to. I’ve been there and done that and it rendered an IR blaster I was using useless for a year and a half. I have since replaced it with a zigbee IR blaster, but nonetheless, the devs post a changelog with each update and if your specific devices do not have any benefit from the update, again, DO NOT UPDATE! Take it from someone who learned the hard way.
And yeah Tom, I saw it had been discussed a little…probably means I may be right and people are a little pissed off with this issue.
Has anyone ever timed how long it takes per device to update on a speedy HA system device?
And what if you have say 35+ devices as I used to have?
I can see now why I only have 8 indispensible devices left right there!
What a waste of devices simply because nobody can rationalise low impact updates are rolled out.
“Both the Home Assistant and ESPHome updates have the same frequency - monthly - so that would make no difference.”
What rubbish is this Tom? I usually get up to 3 HA updates per month…which results in same number of ESPHome updates…MADNESS!
And since this has been so frequently discussed I’ll shut my mouth and leave you all with it!
HA/ESPHome is different and aligns more with continuous delivery and rolling releases.
But both, HA and ESPHome are open source and if you don’t violate name rights (need to change names) you could repack just like you sad and provide wellsy releases which align with your style and also provide them to the public
Maybe for some.
There have been several bugfixes over the last couple of months and none of them have been for the features I use.
Some of the new functionality have however had an impact on some of my devices and those few I have updated.
That is not true.
The extra HA updates are minor monthly releases and ESPHome does not follow the minor ones.
In February HA have had minor updates on 6., 13. and 20. February. ESPHome have only had one on 20. February.
That being said ESPHome have a lot of updates generally at moment, because the devs are working with some big fundamental changes to the code. It should probably calm down in the future, but you will have to evaluate each update, because many of the updates will probably not have changes that apply to your setup and each time you write to your ESPHome’s flash memory there will be a chance of critical unrecoverable failure.
Totally agree, it’s frustrating. My problem is that some bugs I want fixed in an integration depend on other fixes, which in turn require a specific HA Core version and so on, so I’m stuck in the upgrade swamp too.
Ideally I’d only upgrade once or twice a year max, because pushing updates to 23 ESPHome devices takes a while. It’d be pretty sweet if there was some kind of smart agent that just handled it automatically and spit out a single analysis of whatever errors come up.
Right now HA with all its dependencies honestly feels like it needs some kind of stable “Long Term Support” version, though maybe that’s just not feasible for practical reasons.
Please also consider that of the ten thousands or more statisfied non posting users only a few bother to post their problems which most of them can be avoided by the steps mentioned over and over. By why act on those suggestions as even the release notes and breaking changes aren’t read and understood.
