[platform-update-dev] When to Update and when to Find New?

[Mark_Melvin@xxxxxxxx]

Hi All,

We just released another internal milestone
of our tools and I thought I had the hang of this, but I am confused.  We
have a few levels of feature dependencies.  We released an update
today, and I instructed the users to go to Help > Software Updates >
Find and Install..., and choose to search for updates to current plugins.
 The current plugin set was 0.8.1, and we released 0.9.0 of everything
today, so I also instructed them to first change the "Valid Updates"
setting in the preferences to "compatible" so they could see
the updates.  Well, the problem was, the update procedure had to be
done 4 times, once for each level of feature dependencies.  So for
example, if we have Feature A, which requires Feature B, which requires
Feature C (etc.), the user could only first see the update to Feature C.
 They then had to restart, and look for updates again to now find
Feature B, and then do it all over again to find Feature A (now that they
had upgraded their other features).
A particular user who didn't read my
directions, simply blindly went and looked for NEW features to install.
 This happily gave him the option to install version 0.9.0 of ALL
of our features, and did the update mechanism still did all the right things
and disabled the old 0.8.1 versions that were superceded with the "new"
features.  

So, this just seems odd to me.  We
released an update, not a new package.  What I would *expect* to happen
is for the update wizard to show me ALL feature updates to 0.9.0, but not
let me install v0.9.0 of Feature A unless I *also* selected v0.9.0 of its
dependencies.  Should it not show me ALL available *updates* to all
installed features, but still do dependency checking on what I am installing
(similar to the way the install *new* features works)?  Is this a
bug or am I doing something wrong here?  

BTW - my match rule is "greater
or equal" on all my dependencies, but that shouldn't matter in my
opinion.  The available updates wizard should not restrict my choice
to upgrade EVERYTHING, as long as I am upgrading my dependencies at the
same time.

Thanks,
Mark.