So TrueNas Scale notifies me when there is a App Update ( I guess new Docker Image Update ) however there are no release notes but also no reference to the App Version.
So for exmaple i’ve paperless-ngx 1.2.28 and got notified that 1.2.29 was released. However i cant find this release number on paperless-ngx and on dockerhub i cant seem to find it either.
So how can i check the release notes when there is an App Update in TrueNas Scale?
Even just a URL pointing to the git commit that has this update in the catalog would let us try puzzling out what is changing.
The short answer here is that there is no way to read release notes for app updates in TrueNAS. Due to the way the catalog changes work, many updates of individual apps are just bumps to keep that app in line with an update to the catalog overall. There have been internal discussions about how to make that update dialog more helpful in future versions, but that won’t include per-app release notes due to the amount of manual work it would require.
For the time being (noting that this isn’t ideal but a workaround you can do until the dialog is updated) what you can do is learn what you’re looking at in TrueNAS and where you can look for more information. So, TrueNAS Apps have two version numbers shown, Version and App Version (https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasapps/#understanding-versions). The Version, like 1.2.29, is internal to the TrueNAS catalog. The App Version is the upstream version that you could find on the project or dockerhub.
When you see a bump in Version, you could check if this also includes a bump in the upstream App Version by taking a look at the TrueNAS Apps repo (GitHub - truenas/apps). If I was looking to check what was going on with that paperless-ngx update I could locate that app in the /trains directory and look at the git blame for app_versions.json (https://github.com/truenas/apps/blame/master/trains/community/paperless-ngx/app_versions.json#L12).
Doing that, I can see that the most recent changes are to the (TrueNAS catalog) version and the app_version was last updated to 2.14.7 a month ago. If that had been a recent update, I could go to the upstream project or just Google paperless-ngx 2.14.7 to see what those app changes are. In this case it’s just an internal catalog change and more often than not that’s just a bump to keep it in line with other catalog changes (a side effect of using a catalog that should slow down a bit once the catalog overall is more stable). You could dig through the history in the repo to really drill down on the catalog version of the app, but that becomes a game of diminishing returns.
For the documentation website side of things, I’ve opened a Pull Request to the TrueNAS documentation repository that adds a new method for us to call versioning info directly out of the specific app’s version file and displays it in the related App article, along with some other (hopefully) useful information and links. Still WIP, but looking to have this done soon!
