A small moan

[zanzio]

Ugh…, This argument again. We’ve had this discussion already in this tread:

The most annoying thing about Blender 2.80

The most annoying thing I find about Blender 2.80 is that people keep referring to it as Blender 2.8. It’s Two dot Eighty, not Two dot Eight. There is a difference of 72 version numbers between the two. Two dot eight would have been in the early 2000s (Ref: https://download.blender.org/release/) but was never released as a downloadable version. It just seems weird when people talk about moving from Blender 2.79 to 2.8. The way software versions usually work is that each number separated by a …

and before that in this thread:

Why Is This Blender 2.8?

So this might seem a bit arbitrary, but I can’t help but wonder why Blender’s version numbers rise so slowly. Blender 2.8 is clearly an enormous revamp which should and is generate as much buzz as possible, and it creeps up from 2.79 to 2.8 like a minor bugfix in other software versioning. Does this matter? Well, it’s a psychology thing. You want to emphasise the significance of a step and this gradualism rather does the opposite, positively downplaying it. So I’m interested in why the versioni…

and a bunch of other times before that in yet more theads that I don’t feel like looking up. This is one of those areas where blender has chosen its own way to go about things. I personally prefer a naming scheme that refers to each release by the year and month it came out on rather than any numbers based names, but either way I don’t think it matters too much in the end.

In your case, I think the best solution is to do as safetyman suggested and download the zip version for each release first.

Edit:No wait, I take that back. Your best option would probably be to copy the contents of the current version before updating, then add a folder named config under its “version” folder (In this case the folder is named “2.79”). This will make the copy of the current version portable, and you will always have that version as a backup in case there are issues with the new version.

They don’t wait until any sort of “major” release to do things like update which version of python blender uses, so addons do at times need to be updated in order to work for an incremental release.