Too many upgrades these days? Not really a problem.

Another minor WP version is out and guys in (WP)Tavern are discussing whether it's O.K. or it isn't and how they feel about it and so on. I will prefer pin my humble opinion here, so that it will seem like this site is still alive :-).

For me, it's pretty much OK that the new version was released immediately after fixing the issue. „The problem“ of new release are the implications. Which means:

1. „new version available“ announcement method
2. upgrade distribution method

Announcement method

There are always sites where I forgot to install/activate my „Hide the upgrade message“ extension and the content-administrators must look at it and think about it. You say, they can just click to upgrade? I know they simply won't, it's too technical area of administration (or there is other constraint, like you're asked for FTP username/password). Like when the upgrade screen offers you localization-related options. That is by the way quite poorly designed and implemented, though the idea is nice.

Distribution/in­stallation method

Second part of my problem. It hurts me. I like simple, effective, efficient, smoothly working things. What is this WordPress automatic-upgrade mechanism? An opposite. This crazy script downloads whole WP package, unpacks it a rewrites old files with new files. What is the most ridiculous part? It always download the package and rewrites everything. When upgrading from WP 2.8.3 to 2.8.4, there are exactly 3 files modified (including the files where only number of version is changed). But upgrade-script doesn't care. Download and rewrite everything is much more simpler than create incremental changes package, download it (5 KB instead of 2 MB) and apply it, isn't it? This is just stupid. No apologies.

Not speaking about when you actually can't finish the automatic upgrade because the script from some reason doesn't „consider“ 32 MB memory limit sufficient. You make me sad, WP core guys.