Is there any advantage to installing new versions of octopi when they are available vs running apt-get update/upgrade every once in a while? The latter is less work. The only down side I've seen so far is that the "Octopi version" string shown when I ssh into my pi isn't updated. What else might I be missing?
That's a good question. This is probably one of those times when you do have to say "that depends" in response.
- Most of the differences from any OctoPi version x to y would be just the underlying OctoPrint software itself.
- There are times, though, when the underlying Raspbian image itself has updated. The difference between OctoPi 0.15.x and 0.16.x represents a difference of the Raspbian June 2018 to November 2018 as I recall. So the 0.16.x would work great on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or a 3A and the earlier ones wouldn't.
If you update an OctoPi 0.15.x with a combination of sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade as well as taking the production release(s) of OctoPrint itself then it's quite likely that you'd have the same as starting over with 0.16.x.
Now, attempting to answer from canon, there are a few things going on behind-the-scenes.
Yeah. I understand that OctoPi != OctoPrint although OctoPi contains a copy of OctoPrint.
Updating Raspbian is easy. Updating OctoPrint is easy. Installing a new image of OctoPi isn't in that I've the added headache of trying to remember and re-apply any changes I've made and I may well have to update OctoPrint after installing OctoPi, too (I'm currently running 1.3.11rc2). That's why I was curious if there were any other differences.
Foosel is on the way to switch from Python 2 to Python 3 in several steps. I think when this is complete and Python 2 is obsolete, a fresh new install is recommended to get off all the stuff that is not needed anymore.
For the record, base image updates aren't the only thing that go into new OctoPi images. Sometimes there are also changes to the included scripts, sometimes made necessary by changes to Raspbian.
The new backup and restore plugin in OctoPrint should hopefully make it easier to switch to a new OctoPi image.