Allow updating to a -dev or new major branch with Update manager

I understand the problem here but I'm not sure if this is a bug we should be concerned about. When installing dev, beta, or release candidate you assume a certain level of risk that you shouldn't expect when installing a major or minor release.

I would suggest you drop your database and start over with a fresh database. Even though the development release is fresher than the beta releases, there is too much going on for this development process to ensure that an upgrade will work from one broken (by definition beta = "doesn't work") to another broken (by definition DEV = "likely doesn't work") version.

Let me know what you think.

This has to be major, at least until whether users can "upgrade between branches e.g. from 2.x to 3.x" is tested.

- You can't install something that's already there. That's updating. That's why the "install" workflow doesn't work in that case. That's by design.

- People who really want to use the bleeding edge -dev releases are likely to be developers. That's not the target audience of the Update manager. If you want to install -dev over beta2 before beta3 comes out, use drush or the shell. If you don't really know what you're doing and you need to upgrade between official releases, use the Update manager.

- You can't currently switch major versions via the Update manager until the maintainer marks the one you're on not supported. That *might* be considered a bug, but I don't think so. Again, given the target audience, we're trying to keep this UI as simple as possible so that we don't overwhelm novice admins. I'd be willing to reconsider, but given how many truly major bugs we have to solve, this doesn't seem like something there's any chance of changing this late in D7.

So, I'm bumping this to a D8 feature request to provide a UI (maybe) to allow more advanced users a way to say "yes, I know I might break my site by doing so, but go ahead and try to upgrade me to the latest -dev release or a new major branch for project X". However, this needs to be done in a subtle and careful way, so we don't confuse the main target audience that wants this to Just Work(tm) without a ton of options and bells and whistles to distract them. Hence the "Usability" tag (although there's no proposed UI in here to review yet).

This could perhaps be a feature provided by update_advanced in D7, although I'm not sure if there's a good way for that contrib to hook into the update workflow for this. It'd be a great idea if someone want to try to make that work via a D7 contrib to see if it's possible without any further API changes to Update manager.

Cheers,
-Derek

I agree the ability to run a -dev is questionable. It will clutter the UI and potentially confuse folks who use this tool who are likely to only need to run stable releases.

I think the ability to upgrade from 8.x-1.0 to 8.x-2.1 is a fine idea that we should probably support in the update manager but it's definitely a new feature.

Adding the new Update manager dev tag to track this with other issues relating to how Update manager handles -dev releases.

Just re-found #519470: Distinguish between released versions of the same project when selecting projects to upgrade with Update manager which was the original issue about this.