Releasing Updates for Mods to 4.x

[consolegaming]

Ok so I can understand the announcement about the update notifications. But what is the actual update procedure? i.e. Releasing your own updated mods from 3.x to 4.x.

The actual mod I'm working on is finished and pretty much ready for release but it's this release step which I am unsure on when it comes to re-releasing my own mod. Now at the moment as I have updated my product rather than start from scratch, the product id is the same and surely for people upgrading that would need to be the case? As it would need to overwrite the old plugin i.e. ppl shouldn't have to uninstall the old version (lose all their settings in the process) and then install the new one.

So how should I go about this? This will be the first time for me releasing an updated version (on a different series) of my own mod.

Sorry if there's already an article/thread that answers this question but I couldn't find anything from my brief look and I'm a bit perplexed on how this should be handled.

After taking a look at one of Paul's mods it seems he used separate product id's but what about the issue with install/uninstall code adding/removing extra fields? Surely people uninstalling the old version would remove database fields that are added on the install. Shouldn't the upgrade process be as simple as possible for everyone?