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By sprite on
Currently Drupal 7.x core updates involve multiple steps and a decent amount of Drupal knowledge.
Currently Drupal 8.x updates can be done with a single command, so long as the website builder has installed the SSH CLI composer utility, a unix command line utility. Once the setup is done it can most of the time be relatively painless. But for many potential Drupal website builders, they do not have command line access to their website server. This problem also means that hosting companies need to be educated about Drupal 8 requirements.
However, to make future Drupal updates "easy for forever", Drupal needs and order of magnitude better internal dependency and updating infrastructure. If other CMS tools have solved this problem, Drupal's developers should be able to as well, to provide admin UI one click Drupal core updates. Drupal website maintainers will still need to make backups and so forth, but the update itself should be done with all the infrastructure of the "composer" utility built right into Drupal's admin system itself and integrated with the Drupal admin GUI.
This ought to be a priority for the future development focus of Drupal core, along with an order of magnitude better support for media (images, audio, video) integration into Drupal website building and maintenance.
Comments
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I agree with you that offering Core updates through the admin GUI would be a big step forward in the improvement of Drupal. There is a discussion in #606592: Allow updating core with the update manager about this issue, see also #2845379: Provide optional composer integration but don't force users to understand how to use composer.
Actually, it is perfectly possible to update Drupal core for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 from the command line with
drush up drupal, without Composer on the server. See this documentation page: Update procedure in Drupal 8.For D8 there's the added clause that you're are not using modules which require Composer, which is perfectly possible.
drush 8 don't work with Drupal 8.4.x
I just ran a
drush dl drupal-8 --selectand wasn't offered the latest version 8.4.x, only 8.3.x, because Drush 8 support for Drupal 8.4.x is not quite working (see #2874827: Drush 8.x doesn't install Drupal 8.4.x and Drush master doesn't install Drupal 8.3.x), in which case Composer is required for Drupal 8 core updates via CLI very soon...There is a Github issue, which tries to implement future Drush 8 compatibility Attempt Drupal 8.4.x support in Drush 8.x via the global Drush #2787. Fingers crossed Greg will pull it off, a Composer requirement for all Drupal 8 installations from 8.4 on October 4, 2017 will be a major set back ...
On the other hand there is also this comment:
https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/pull/2800