I see that Opnsense is listed there, “a FreeBSD-based specialist operating system designed for firewalls and routers” while ROS is not.
For the avoidance of doubt, I gave a thumbs-up to Amm0’s “who cares?” (paraphrasing).
I was just making fun of. 
Of course is matters. Otherwise most of the conversations down the pub would be void. Arguing over schematics and things that aren’t that important is an important part of social interaction.
Completely agree - this is a positive change
"gnu utilities" it is usually referring to GNU core utils. Not to confuse with the GNU license, which is a very different thing.
That is cute but for some upgrade scenarios, for example from ROS 6 or ROS < 7.12, you do need interim upgrade to version 7.12.2.
And although I know one could retype download link with needed version, software archive page would still be easier to use and I believe that you should let users decide what they want to use since it seems to me that most of us are quite capable of making our own decisions...
If you are on v6 then the possible intermediate step is 6.49.19 from which you can go straight to a current 7.2x release. I have done that on a couple of radio-equipped devices.
7.12 is needed as a middle station installation 
I thought that this changelog item was for exactly this issue:
What's new in 6.49.19 (2026-Jan-13 12:15):
*) upgrade - the upgrade, testing, and development channels now direct to the latest long-term version of RouterOS v7;
This would mean going straight from 6.49.19 to 7.20.8. I'll admit I haven't tried it; is there something wrong with this feature?
Maybe I'm wrong or just a llttle bit uninformaed but there is still 7.12 mentioned on the help page
I assume that it means that help is not updated yet.
That may be so regarding the documentation. If 7.12 is used as an intermediate step then ROS is handling it invisibly and silently. It is a fact that I went directly from 6.49.19 to 7.2x. on a couple of boxes. I believe that enabling this was the principal change in 6.49.18 to 6.49.19. I have previously had to use the 7.12 route when that version first came out, but not now.
Except that scripts (curl) used be able to a HTTP POST (not GET, which browser does) to directly get the CSV via https://mikrotik.com/products/matrix in the old site.
The new LiveWire stuff generates the CSV in browser, or at least that's what it appears. I have scripts that uses this to match model number fro /system/resources to the specs in the "matrix CSV". For example:
curl -X POST https://mikrotik.com/products/matrix -d "ax=matrix"
I don't care if the URL changes, but if be nice if there was a fixed URL to be able to get to the "matrix CSV", e.g. similar to build, releases notes, mibs which all have a fixed URL scheme.
Just tried ... I have a router still on ROS v6. It was set to channel=long-term and was running 6.49.18. When running /system package update check, it came back with latest version 6.49.19. If I changed channel to channel=upgrade, then check command came back with latest-version: 7.12.1.
Then I switched channel back to long-term and upgraded ROS to 6.49.19. After successful upgrade, I tried the game with channel=upgrade again ... and this time it came back with latest-version: 7.20.8.
So it does seem that MT included the "wireless/wifiwave2 upgrade magic" from 7.12 to 6.49.19 as well.
I'm a bit curious (but won't test) about whether 6.49.19 upgrader can handle the "de-bundled" v6 installation (default was to have installed bundle, which contained many packages ... and then one could install additional optional packages ... and uninstall some unneeded packages, otherwise parts of base bundle, such as routing and a few others). In early v7 versions (which was in not-so-late v6 times) built-in upgrader wasn't capable of doing it.
It should according to the changelog:
