Agreed, that can be a simply improvement.
Just to iterate over the intention again:
We do not want to make storagenodes unhappy by not giving them data! Our only intention here is to ensure, we can keep making improvements on our protocol and code base without being stuck as a big chunk of nodes does not update regularily or in our cadence.
This percentage is in the neighborhood of 10-20% from all active nodes on the network.
At that point, when deciding to increase our minimum version from v1.9 to lets say v1.12, then we would need to start repairing quite a lot of data, which is making the “outdated” nodes even more unhappy if they then decide to upgrade and notice tons of deletes.
This is a fairly tricky balancing act between development speed and network stability, which directly affects the storagenode income (and for the most the outdated nodes).
As an highlight we are very close to having the linux updater be available (which can be run natively and will be ran directly in the docker image as well). This helps many of our unique and special setups i have seen in this forum so far.
Our improvement story does not end here, we are working on a native debian package than can be installed via apt, yum, etc.
TLDR: Please do not see our second measurement as requirement, rather than safety net before a node will entirely lose its data and thus potential payout, if all data has been repaired of which the given node held pieces.