Not to beat a dead horse here, but despite being a beta tester, I rarely find bugs or have issues. I do update and use every beta and normal release, often within about an hour of publication.
So while I have empathy for those who have issues upon upgrading, it completely astonishes me that people are encountering such bad bugs or losing whole zwave networks to the point where they are afraid to upgrade.
I will repeat that there must be something going on with certain hub setups or certain devices attached to a hub to be causing this experience for some users. For example, I suspect that the OP has some known troublemaking Zwave devices like the Zen25 crashing his mesh, or some other failing or flaky device on his mesh. We can't see what he has and he has not posted screenshots, so we are in the dark here.
That is pretty much what happens in Beta testing. It may not be as formalized as you are speaking of, but we sure do test a bunch of stuff, especially new things. I am not sure of their behind the scenes testing (Alpha test or otherwise), but I am almost certain that they do some level of this before Beta.
When there is a public release, it IS considered stable as far as I am aware.
I think you need to start a new post and let us see your Zwave devices. You should not be having issues like that. Additionally, you might work with support to have them use the diagnostic logs to see what is going on behind the scenes.
This has not been the experience of most of the Zwave users on here, and it should not act the way you are stating. Please have the community and official support help you instead of suffering with this.
I'm really not going by this thread and the Zwave probs in particular.
Just looking at the Release Notes and subsequent fixes to introduced problems....; there are plenty of opportunities to say whew, glad I waited .
Not throwing shade, sh_t happens in complicated systems. I really think this is just a debate about the cost/benefit to a consequential release going out to everyone sooner rather than later.
Maybe introduce the concept of a Gamma stage, e.g. we think we've vetted this well enough through the Beta testing but for the next 30 days consider this version up for a wider audience to vet.
God knows the whole industry has gotten out of a lot of the testing process that use to take MAN YEARS of INTERNAL effort. To be fair, it use to take man years to develop stuff that now seems to be doable in a month. SOOOO there's that....
I am glad that you appreciate the speed at which our engineers resolve issues caused by bugs that have not been caught during alpha or beta testing. We know there is always room for improvement to release updates to the public that have less problems, and to limit the future problems, we have recently expanded our Beta testing group. We are very fortunate to have so many beta testers who are helping us deliver a better product, with each release.
With that being said, I would like to clarify, that a main database problem does not affect the Z-Wave database. There are two distinct databases and we patch the Z-Wave database when Silicon Labs releases an update and the update is thoroughly tested by our engineers.
Regarding your Z-Wave issues, I wish that you had reached out to our support, or here in the community, before you made the decision to reset the radio. While some persistent issues prior to last Z-Wave update may have required a radio reset, there are other ways to resolve Z-Wave issues that do not involve nuking the radio.
I'll also say not much has been done with z-wave since 2.2.8 I believe. At worst updates expose corruption in the database or other things that have been problematic. @k3vmcd Why haven't you reached out to solved these issues. The fact that you say every update is breaking them is indicative of something else in your mesh or database. Posting things like your z-wave details page is a good way to help us help you. This way we can see what devices you have, if there is something else going on, we can query you and zero in on your issues. For instance, my first question would be if you have any zooz products in the mix. Do you have any beaming repeaters to help stabilize things. (just because something mains powered repeats like a switch or outlet doesn't mean it's getting very far) We'd like to see your rssi for various devices, wed like to see logs, what 3rd party apps are you running? These are all important questions for not just the community but support to help you. As others have said, stay in what works for you, but upgrading normally won't break a mesh unless something z-wave specific has been done. (which it hasn't in a long time)
I would love to be able to do that. However, you donât get to chose which version to upgrade to, so as soon as the new version is out, youâve lost the chance to upgrade to the previous version. I have raised this in the past as a feature request, but was quickly shot down by @bravenelFeature request: Select what version to upgrade to
Upgrade and then go to http://yourHubIP:8081 and select Restore to Previous Version. Should give you the option for the 3 prior production releases, mine currently shows:
Yes, the downgrade ability is there of course. But this would still not give you the option of staying one version behind the current version. If on 2.2.8 now, I cannot now upgrade to 2.2.9, I have to take 2.3.0
If I upgrade from 2.2.8, I cannot, as I understand it, upgrade to 2.3.0 and then rollback to 2.2.9. The rollback options you have are only the last 3 versions that the hub has had installed to it. Not the last three versions that are available from Hubitat
Iâve upgraded to every release of 2.3.0, and still have the option to go back to 2.2.9.146 (same with my dev hub which is in the beta program and therefore has done several more releases of 2.3.0)âŚ
But unfortunately that doesn't answer the important question-- if someone upgrades from 2.2.8 to 2.3.0, can they then immediately downgrade to 2.2.9? @bravenel, any comments on whether this is possible or not?
Ok, maybe it keeps one restore point to the previous major version as well, but only if it has been installed to the hub previously. If I went from 2.2.8 to 2.3.0 now, it wouldnât be logical even to have a 2.2.9 restore point, right? Think about it, whatâs the point of being able to roll back to version youâve never used before? You wouldnât have a matching database version to restore with it
Yes, thank you. As far as I know it is not possible. This is why "just stay a major release behind" is such frustrating advice. With the tools we're given, we can't.
I think if you think about it there is a way, may not be convienent for you, but ⌠Having said that, I can see that this thread is really not about wanting a solution so Iâm done with it.
And if I time it wrong, and wait a little too long such that the next major release is out... then what? This is such a user-unfriendly mechanism to allow staying with "stable" versions.
If firmware updates seem to break your setup more often than they do for most of us, you could also do some additional investigating to look into why that is occurring. Thatâs what @bobbyD and others are encouraging OP to do.
