Question about Staged Releases

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Windows R37.XX Release (US).

MontanaKarl

Hi @Quicken Sarah
So confused... what does "paused" mean (which happened to 37.25 too) ... does that mean that a serious issue has been found and so we should NOT download the Mondo Patch but should wait for more news?

Quicken Sarah

Hi Karl (@MontanaKarl)

That's a great question and thank you for reaching out!

If a staged release has been paused it does not mean that there is an issue with the release.  We typically send out our product releases as "staged", meaning we make them available to a limited number of users and then pause the release to listen for any reported issues/concerns.

If no issues or problems are reported, the release will then be made available to a larger number of users and paused again while we watch for issues, and so on, until the release is made available to all users.

If an issue is reported, then we keep the release paused while we work on a fix and will then make a new release that starts the cycle over again.

If you'd like, more information on our release process is also available here.

I hope this helps and thank you again for reaching out,

Sarah

Chris_QPW

Even though @Quicken Sarah general question about what pausing means, and the general procedure I think a comment about R37.25 is really needed.

From what I can tell R37.25 was branched out from R36.38. Note R36.38 is minimum needed to support the new Charles Schwab connection.

So here you have this stagger realise version R37.25 released to a limited amount of people.  And then the conversion for Charles Schwab kicks in and there are problems they needed to address.  Since R37.25 had yet to get to the point where they were comfortable to give it everyone they put out R36.41 which “builds on” R34.38 (skipping new features/fixes that are in R37.25).  And after that R36.45 for more fixes for problems with the Charles Schwab connection.

So did R37.25 have problems that mean it should never get released?  Not that I saw, instead it was just bad timing with the Charles Schwab problems that needed immediate fixing.

And if I’m reading all this correctly the latest R37 release that is in staged release/paused mode should now have all the changes from all these patch releases.

Q97

> @Quicken Sarah said:
> Hi Karl (@MontanaKarl)
>
> That's a great question and thank you for reaching out!
>
> If a staged release has been paused it does not mean that there is an issue with the release.  We typically send out our product releases as "staged", meaning we make them available to a limited number of users and then pause the release to listen for any reported issues/concerns.
>
> If no issues or problems are reported, the release will then be made available to a larger number of users and paused again while we watch for issues, and so on, until the release is made available to all users.
>
> If an issue is reported, then we keep the release paused while we work on a fix and will then make a new release that starts the cycle over again.
>
> If you'd like, more information on our release process is also available here.
>
> I hope this helps and thank you again for reaching out,
>
> Sarah

Other products allow you to subscribe to various channels (Dev Channel, Beta Channel, Release Preview Channel, General Availability Channel, etc) depending on how adventurous or conservative you may be. I wish Quicken had a similar feature. Personally, I want to subscribe only to the General Availability channel. I don't want Quicken to ever offer me an update unless it is GA and thus released to all users. If there's a way to do that, please let me know. If not, consider this a feature request.

Rocket J Squirrel

Q97 said:

I want to subscribe only to the General Availability channel. I don't want Quicken to ever offer me an update unless it is GA and thus released to all users. If there's a way to do that, please let me know. If not, consider this a feature request.

There is a way, but it's manual. First, set Windows UAC to not allow any updates without your permission. Then visit this forum periodically, perhaps monthly, to see what's new. If things look stable, update, otherwise wait. That's what I do on my production machine. I'm here daily, but I have a secondary PC which I use to preview releases before allowing them on my production PC. It's extra work, but worth it to help protect my data.

leishirsute

Is R36.45 staged, or is it available to all users?  The R36.xx announcement does not indicate what it is.

Please advise.

Chris_QPW

R36.45 is the last version released to everyone.  In the announcement she didn't say it is "paused", so that means everyone is getting it.  In general, if you don't accept the patches automatically, then you can use Help -> Check For Updates to see what is the currently released version.

leishirsute

R36.41 also doesn't say paused and yet it lasted 2 days before R36.45 was announced.   It was much clearer when she wrote that the release was available to all users.  Check for Updates seems to also give latest staged update.  I didn't find it a reliable way to get the latest release for all users.

However, I see that the announcement for R36.45 has been updated and now says available for all users.  That takes out the ambiguity for me.

Thanks

Chris_QPW

leishirsute said:

R36.41 also doesn't say paused and yet it lasted 2 days before R36.45 was announced. 

R36.41 and R36.45 are what I would call emergency patches to address the problem with rolling out the fixes for the Charles Schwab connection change over, as such they were certainly pushed out faster than normal.  And in fact, that is probably why R237.25 got caught in the middle.

And yes, it would be nice if @Quicken Sarah would put in the wording that says a release is now released to all users.