For maybe a couple of weeks now whenever, like daily, I run “dietpi-update” I get shown a list of “live patches” out of which three are marked as “[not applicable]” but the fourth one (but first in the list) instead is marked as “[not applied]” even though it seems to not be applicable for my system.
The description for that update is “Fix Sonarr v4 permissions for updater in dietpi-software. Only needed if you plan to install or migrate to Sonarr v4 via dietpi-software.” but I have not installed and do not plan to ever install Sonarr, so I don’t know:
Am I actually advised to install that live patch for something that extremely probably will not ever be installed on that machine?
If not, maybe there should be some way to tell dietpi-update to disregard one or some live patches, so that it will move on to check for other updates when run manually?
you can simply apply the patch. It is not doing any harm to your system. It will simply adjust a single line within dietpi-software which we ship anyway on next DietPi version.
The live patch implementation is (meant to be) minimal with short description etc, so bear with us if it might leave questions open. A patch is “applicable” if the “condition” command succeeds. One of the Sonarr patches e.g. patches an installed Sonarr service, so it is obvious this cannot work if Sonarr is not installed. The other patches dietpi-software to have the correct service installed in the first place, and there for the condition we check only whether the line we patch really exist, which is true unless it has been manually touched before or a development branch of DietPi is installed or so. But of course this patch only matters if you do (re)install Sonarr before next DietPi release, no matter whether the “condition” is met, so I thought that info would not be bad. I mean many users do not know what Sonarr is, and might then be unsure whether they need it or not.
But as Joulinar said, the patches are carefully applied, including the “condition” to make sure they can, so it does not hurt to apply all which are “applicable”. Some just do not like to have code on their system changed without a regular release, incremented version string etc, so we kept those patches optional, for which a full DietPi release would be overkill (also for our efforts).
Yep, the information displayed on the next screen when I applied the live patch in question helped me understand that there was no reason to not apply it even though I did and do not intend to install Sonarr.
Maybe the selection-part of that process could have some extra text prepended reassuring users that “Applying the live patches marked as applicable is recommended even if the device is not expected to ever have the relevant software installed”, or similar?
Yes, my text in the quote-marks was much longer and detailed in the initial draft and shorted for that reason. Also, if there is too much text, people will likely realistically just not read any of it whether they “should” or not.
