I don't
necessarily disagree. I was just commenting that, in some ways, the fact that it leaves your existing system alone and you have to "switch to" the new version somewhat manually is a benefit. I do agree that it would be "easier" for many users for it to be more seamless and automatic.
On the other hand, there
are benefits to how they carefully migrate the Library (by cloning it) and not all of the settings. All settings can't always be migrated without
substantial work on their end, first of all. Even attempting it hamstrings them a bit in major changes to the current "infrastructure" of the program (they'd think, I'd like to fix this, but then I have to spend two weeks perfecting the settings migration, so maybe next year).
There are also a lot of users each year who come along with some borked setting, then install the new version and then say "Hey, upgrading to MC21 fixed my issue." If you gave them the option, those same users would probably migrate their settings, and then still be sad with the new version. So, the once-a-year "reset to something known" (the defaults) can do a lot of
good, particularly for users who like to fiddle (even when in over their heads).
Also, if the upgrade necessitates a backwards-incompatible Library change, migrating settings automatically could be very dangerous. That's because, one of the settings is (of course) the other Libraries you have loaded in the Library Manager. If they migrate that, and then the user switches to an alternate Library, and it is "upgraded" to the new version, there could be some serious hurt fee-fees when the user discovers the auxiliary (or perhaps main) Library can no longer be opened by the older version. They could work around that by a warning, of course, but then that's one more warning that people blindly click through (warning dialog overload is a serious issue, look no further than Vista's failure for an example).
And it is more code to write and maintain, and blah blah blah. So... There's stuff on both sides.
In my experience with MC for many, many, many major versions, you can basically
always migrate almost all settings yourself by making a
Library Backup in the old version, opening the new version, and restoring the Library Backup. That remains true here, with the possible exception of the ZoneSwitching rules (for which I believe there was some fairly major surgery behind the scenes).
I haven't thoroughly tested with MC21 yet, but in the past the rule was:
* The currently loaded
Library in the old version is cloned and made the new default on the new version.
*
Settings, other than those tied directly to the Library (Auto-Import settings and whatnot), are NOT migrated automatically. To get those, you have to restore a Library Backup and choose to restore the Settings.
That seems like a reasonable "middle of the road" solution. You can do it, but it only does the "safe" stuff (and necessary, as you'll need your Library) by default, and lets you perform the "less safe" migration yourself. That way, hopefully, you might notice if restoring the settings broke it, when it worked before.
It seems like this time, they might have actually done more than that automatically. But I'm not sure because I've been busy and I only have MC21 installed now in a VM, and not on any of my "real" systems.
Author
Topic: MC20 to MC21 - What user data gets automatically migrated? (Read 8420 times)