It needs more incentives. Sync performance on small files is an issue for a very long time and if you promote such a solution, people are perhaps more willing to test this. A long time ago, I tested a few this on a raspberry system myself to see the influence of redis and the database caches (Upload performance OC 8.2.1 (50 mysql queries per file) Ā· Issue #20967 Ā· owncloud/core Ā· GitHub). But it takes you easily a day and with all the follow up more time.
For you that is obvious. There is nothing in the RC1 news. Yes you can go back, you can check on github, ā¦ You announce it one day, then there is a release, you donāt mention it again, even the discussion from last time with the announcement, you donāt repost to say that now there is something out, that people might want to test. Also tons of posts with sync performance with git repositories etc.
The thing is, you want people to test it, so donāt make it harder than it has to be.
The issue isnāt solved yet, but perhaps it can be figured out which platforms and environments need better testing.
yeah, I know I failed to mention that more clearly in the requests for testing. But my reply was more at your comment that testing takes a lot of time because the file sync is so slow - that should, going forward, be a lot faster, which hopefully makes testing less of a pain.
Ok, I didnāt mean that either Itās just in general, setting up an extra environment, installing another client etc. takes a lot of time. If the upload takes 2h, I donāt have to sit there and watch. And if I do this effort, I either want to learn something, or get some benefit ot of it, like a new feature I was waiting for a long time.
I donāt think āincentivesā would help. In my eyes testing is the hardest part of the development process as you donāt have clear defined goals like āit compiles letās sell itā ( only joke ). working through well designed runbook and carefully looking for issues which might be not obviousā¦ especially client testing is really hard - running this in production is bad idea, finding good test coverage with production like usage (donāt forget all the moving parts like client reboots, hibernation, network outage, software updates, interaction with other software packages like anti-virus, different OSā¦) is a nightmare - I donāt think you can count on this forum to find highly trained people+willing to spend big amount of their spare time+to test beta softwareā¦
If you want good results - testing must be done by the most experienced people you have - this is the reason majority of testing should happen close to the devs - they are expected to be familiar with the product, know where to look in case of issues and can involve their colleagues fastā¦ This forum can help when it comes to real-life testing on different platforms and cover all the variations of real-world installationsā¦ but this must be the very last testing stage with solid, well tested versions you already consider production ready but need last confirmation.
Iām the last one who blaims you for this specific bug - I know the competing market, demanding customers - but I think there is huge room for improvement in communications between Nextcloud GmbH and the community as discussed in depth here
I donāt think for regular updates. But regarding new feaures, they did it differently for the virtual file system, first it was an alpha-feature, disabled by default.
The problem with the community, you donāt know what systems are tested and which environments. As you said, you need to cover a huge amount of different scenarios.
The first releases after the fork, I had the impression that the whole story of reliable updates was improving. People trust Nextcloud with data, sure you should have backup and everything. But how often will you do a restore from backup before you ditch a product?
@jospoortvliet Youāre absolutely right we need more users to start testing the RC versions. Id be happy to volunteer my time to test and report issues.
Yes, RC version can cause issues with users data but for testing why not have a test profile, test computer or vm so it only has the RC version and incase of an issues you donāt have to worry about your data. Thats the whole point about the project we all have to put in some work. The devs can only test so much. I get we canāt get everyone onboard with testing but if we want a better product we should. Yes, I agree with everyone that V3.4.0 caused alot of issues and i was one of the admins that had to do a restore as well but at the end of the day we cant only blame Nextcloud. Thats the reason why this wonderful application is free and open source so the community āusā can make the product better.
Thanks for the input all. This time I really shouldāve done better by talking about the new bulk upload feature when asking about testing, as this feature was already talked about, that was really a mistake. It might have made a difference in testing.
In the future I will try to do that, too. Sadly generally we donāt yet want to spill the big features, while with small features weād be happy to talk about the motivation is probably low, but thatās a problem for the future.
In the mean time, I can tell you the desktop client team is debugging hard, working with the server team - there are both server and client issues, it seems, though I guess the server issues are in the new code for bulk upload. As soon as we have a fix weāll publish it of course.
Would it make sense to have the announcements around RC1, instead of Release? Maybe more people would be willing to test, if itās clear, whatās coming. Would also give you time to fix any critical bugs towards release and would be a good time to remind app developers to make sure their apps are compatible with the latest version / for release.
@jospoortvliet Thanks for the update and the explanation!
To answer your question about how to make more people test the RC, a few ideas:
Provide a test server, including dummy files, folders, ā¦ so that any tester can log in, install the client and start testing, without having the risk to lose any data (similar to what @AndyXheli proposes)
I like the ideas above to communicate about RCs and new feature, to make it more appealing
Propose a bonus to people who report feedback (notably the ones finding bugs). Bonus could be ā2 hours of consulting/advice/audit provided by a Nextcloud engineerā (so that the tester receives advice on their own Nextcloud setup for example), a higher priority given to features suggested by the tester, ā¦
At each release, remind to the community that testing RCs is super important and that Nextcloud needs it
Regarding 3.4.1, do you plan to release a RC that we could test? [edit, oups, yes, you wrote it above ]
In general, I think this question is key and would deserve a dedicated discussion, with a lot of publicity so that the community gets really involved.
A 3.4.1RC is here for testing. We improved the reliability of the sync process to better deal with the bug and it seems to fix it. Of course I still should point out that this is a test version, you should backup your data etc!
That said, the more realistic the test case, the more useful the testing is of courseā¦ As usual, any feedback is welcome below here!
Itās just in general, setting up an extra environment, installing another client etc. takes a lot of time. If the upload takes 2h, I donāt have to sit there and watch. And if I do this effort, I either want to learn something, or get some benefit ot of it, like a new feature I was waiting for a long time.
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