There`s nothing more annoying than constant Anki updates, that you either follow and keep in day with it and run the risk of having your Anki addons not working, don’t update it and keep with everything dated or even try to update everything through a unnecesary amount of struggle.
With a LTS Anki version we could have a stable version that would be supported for long times, and as a new version of LTS Anki would’ve got announced, all the Addons developers would have time to update their addons and keep everything as flowing as possible.
No one leaves winning with these frequent updates that constantly break addons, which are really the only thing that truly makes Anki what it is.
Well, the stable version is just a beta that has been tested for a couple of weeks at best… I think that OP here is talking about relasing a stable version every 3-6 months but i don’t really see the point. You can always avoid updating and keep the previous version.
I think the real problem here is why anki breaks half its addons with every new update…
For example, i updated to 2.1.43 last week and i’m still dealing with bugs, incompatibilities from both anki and addons, activating and deactivating addons to understand where they came from. I could’ve avoided updating but the new release had some function that i needed to fix some previous release problems. So the cycle repeats ahah
As far as i know many other programs that use plugins don’t have this problem or at least not in such a problematic way. But since i don’t know much about programming i don’t really know …
I can think only two ways to deal with this problem:
change the way anki manage addons
integrate the most important addons in anki in order to reduce incompatibilities and support problems
It would be good to know why certain plugins break. If API changes, it’s understood, if bad programming the fixes should be provided by the plugin developers.
I have to disagree with that statement. Anki is very powerful without add-ons, too. Deck creators might depend on certain add-ons, but they are not necessary for the majority of users.
I doubt that the small team of active Anki devs has the capacity to support LTS releases. If you want stability, you can always stay on a stable version.
There will undoubtedly be a lot more breaking changes in the future, but they are all aimed at making Anki a more powerful and stable platform. In the long run, add-on devs will profit from these necessary changes too.
Just follow Anki’s GitHub repository for a while and you will see that the devs are really keen on reducing collateral damage with their updates by accumulating breaking changes and introducing them in bigger waves, rather than letting them trickle in one after the other.
Updating the program is optional, if you’re happy with a particular anki version and it’s addons, you will always have the option of just not updating it.
I really like the fact that the program is being developed actively, and new features and improvements are being added continuously.
