Notices by Thomas Kräftner (kraftner@mastodon.social)

@tante So, I guess the only way they'll ever change their path is if some other browser shows up and actually threatens them at being the most privacy friendly option.

@tante I was constantly wondering about those weird moves all the time as well. But I've recently come to a conclusion that is sad but adequately explains their behavior:
As long as everyone needs a browser and all existing alternatives are even worse those who care about privacy will stick with it no matter what. So they focus on (re-)gaining all the other users who do not care about privacy. And as crazy as I personally think that is, AI might actually be able to help with that.

@rimu @jalefkowit WP warns you about this. Also if a plugin has any code that runs by directly accessing a PHP file in it that is just a really shitty plugin one should avoid.

@gmazzap @pfefferle But if the flag is stored in a DB option then never rely on the flag alone because people do "crazy" stuff like downgrade plugin versions . So use it to trigger the migration but then re-check the pre-conditions again. Also make sure that if you run multiple upgrades at once when people do huge version jumps you do them in the right order. I've seen plugins wrecking themselves badly by not paying attention to this. And I've probably missed some more potential issues 🙃

@pfefferle Well it basically is a single "if" comparing a string with an autoloaded option. I'd say the performance impact will be almost impossible to see even in a benchmark. If you've reached that level of performance optimization I really envy your codebase! 😉

@pfefferle Whatever you do: Do not (only) rely on hooks that only trigger when using the standard, internal updating mechanism like https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/upgrader_process_complete/
There are way too many sites out there that update differently (manual, FTP, composer etc.)
Generally I'd say have an autoloaded option that stores the current version you compare with the current version. On mismatch start migration.
Also be careful to handle downgrades or other broken states and not solely rely on version info in the option