Upgrading WordPress sucks.
It is almost perfect - just tar xvfz latest.tar.gz and let it overwrite the files in the wordpress/ dir... but life isn't easy like that.
A bunch of files have been deprecated from various releases and just sit around getting stale. Currently the installation instructions are to just "remove all files" in various places. I would rather just get a list of files that are safe to remove, and be able to blindly copy the archive using tar (or remotely using FTP, etc.)
That shouldn't be too hard.
Right now I have my WP installs for work and home in Subversion, and I can't just move the files because the SVN metadata and directories get lost. I'd prefer to just get a list and I can manually just "svn del" the files myself. So please, for future WP releases, would someone publish the list of files so I don't have to do all this manual work each time? How about a quick and dirty cheat sheet like so:
List of files deprecated by this release:
- foo.php
- bar.php
Database upgrade required: Yes/No
Functions changed or deprecated:
- wp_insert_post() now does this instead of that...
- etc...
This might also make it easy for [us] plugin authors to look at the function deprecation list and easily know if something we're doing could be in trouble 🙂