First, I hope Iām posting under the correct category here. āFeatures & appsā >>> modified it to āReleasesā category
I have somehow asked this question before without getting a satisfactory response. I will try to reformat my question, maybe it was misunderstood.
As I understand, minor version upgrades are for hotfixes, security updates, enhanced performance, ā¦ etc., while major versions are almost new build, but why go for a major upgrades?
Now if I have a stable installation of Nextcloud 24 for example, why would I upgrade to 25, or 26, 27,ā¦100 ?!!
I mean, what does that new version provide over the old one, each time there is a new major upgrade?
Is there a post by Nextcloud or anyone, that depicts the added value of upgrading? other than just to keep up with the new version number and keep chasing the upgrades without purpose, risking loosing stable working setup?
Does Nextcloud team document this in the new version announcement?
The reasons to upgrade are noted within each major release announcement (features and enhancements). The reasons to move to further major releases is to ensure you continue to receive security updates - nextcloud maintains 2 releases behind the current major release though, so you typically would have 18 months.
The reasons to not maintain a single release indefinitely are cost and the expectations of users regarding feature availability- if you dont care about new features, you can always pay for long term maintenance support and remain on your current major release far beyond the standard maintenance support timeframe.
You can visit https://nextcloud.com/changelog/ to see changes from version to version. In addition, https://scan.nextcloud.com/ will allow you to enter the URL of your server instance and will scan it for security issues. Not being up to date is considered a security issue. It will also scan for configuration issues which may be security holes.
Hope this helps, mike
I always upgrade to the latest version shortly after it comes out. In a production environment Iād wait a few days or perhaps a week. My reasons for staying current are:
To keep up with the latest security fixes
To make the upgrade process easier. Thereās no obvious way to upgrade NextCloud across multiple releases. So if I let myself get too far behind and then develop a reason to upgrade, I have to go through all the intervening upgrades to become current again. Thatās a hassle, and a lot of changes all packed into one short time frame. Those headaches arenāt worth it.
Finally, given that Iāve been on NextCloud since version 14, Iāll say the upgrades go remarkably well and remarkably easily. Once in a while thereās a small hiccup, but especially if youāre a couple of days past the initial release, any issues you might come across are already known and solutions are readily available. Often theyāre just a single well documented command, such as to rebuild indices.
Exactly what you risk by not upgrading major versions. You only need to do this once a year, but after that point you lose all support for the stability of the software. So wait however long, but eventually you must move major releases to stay supported.
I too have this question. I am a software developer myself and find it strange that major versions change so rapidly with Nextcloud. Versioning such as v1.0.0 should be changed as MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
First digit is for major/API breaking changes.
Second digit, is for feature updates.
Third digit is for minor changes/bug fixes.
To think that Nextcloud has had 27 major API breaking updates in such a short time seems strange. Unless you are rewriting the package each major update, then I believe the versioning is wrong.
To say that you are doing this due to budget constraints is actually contradictory. To rewrite the code base each time would be astronomically more expensive than adding features and bug fixes to the current version. I could be wrong, but I believe you are actually doing the latter each time you change the major version number.
If there is nothing new to this conversation thread it will be closed. Understandable if we do not agree with the release schedule, but we also get this at zero cost and have to simply accept it will be whatever the devs decide. They can set whatever release cadence they want and we simply live with it as we can.
If you expect to keep updated and functional on Addons especially stuff like Collabora/Office:
ā¦ then you need to go with the major versions too.
Nextcloud is more like a Rolling Releaae similiar to Archlinux.
It might have Major.Minor versioning but there is no kind of LTS, or anything like that Debian offers.
The longer you wait the more painfull the upgrades will be ā¦
Theyād really do themselves a favor hy moving to a better/more understandable versioning schema like YYYY.MM-MILESTONE.PATCH so it becomes much more obvious.
My two cents would be that eventually the major release will no longer be patched. So by staying on 24 when 27 is the latest then you could be missing important security updates.
Another reason could be apps, plugins, api, all that kind of stuff is getting upgraded and those developers may not test or support old versions do you could lose access to stuff.
Or also makes support easier. You may come across a bug and think āgreat, Iāll report thatā. The developers donāt want to keep old code around forever and you could be experiencing something that was actually fixed years ago. There has to be a cut off point on a major release where the devs can archive that code and never have to look back.
So thereās nothing wrong with staying at v24, just donāt be surprised when you get an issue and itās difficult to get help as the Dev team are busy working on the latest release and most other people in forums are several versions ahead so canāt even try to recreate an issue.
For me Iād think is it worth the risk having your data encrypted by ransom ware and having to sort that out to āmaybeā get your data back after having paid a ransom when the vulnerability was patched in v27.
Why go from Windows 95 to Windows 10.
Every Update minor or Major give you securetyupdates.
Support for 24 ended in May 2023, so no Updates no Bugfixes anymore.
As long your Nextcloud is not reachable from the Internet, ok but ifā¦
No need to change Major to Major in an instant, always wait for the first patch.
It depends if your addons you are using still working with the new Version.
Not long ago, groupfolder and fulltextsearc was braking the Nextcloud if used together.
Had to wait til it was fixed.
So far with every major Update the Nextcloud got faster and got nie new features.
If you are using only Vanilla Nextcloud than still alway upgrade as far as you can, to get the benefits of Securetyfixes and performanceenhands.
Hier you get Information wat changed and wat was fixed.
Well, correct me if I am wrong, but now release with major features changes are named HUB since Nextcloud 18. So the features changes are described in the NextCloud HUB announcements without having to read between the lines of each 2x.y.z changelog.
And as someone said before, major version increments are not based on feature changes but on code maintenance and support cycles.
So first Nextcloud HUB was Nextcloud 18.0.0 and as you can read on Changelog - Nextcloud that :
Nextcloud 27.1 is HUB 6
Nextcloud 27.0 is HUB 5
Nextcloud 26.0 is HUB 4
Nextcloud 25.0 is HUB 3
and for each HUB you have highlighted the major changes.
The HUB naming scheme is mainly for marketing and represents the state of features included in the core.
The version scheme (like 27.1.1) is code-oriented. Any software might have flaws and sub-optimal legacy solutions. Nextcloud is not different in this case and might need also some extensions, especially for 3rd party app devs.
As the apps in the app store should not be surprised by any upcoming changes the legacy code snippets are not removed from the core directly but are deprecated first. The legacy code is removed after two major releases (25 ā 27). However, smaller changes can happen on each major release, like the updated frontend Vue components on 24 ā 25. Then, the apps need to adopt this quickly. This causes stress for the app devs in the community.
I know of many app devs that do develop new features only for the master branch of the server (a.k.a. the next major release). If the feature can simply backported, ok, but no additional capacity is wasted on older releases of the server. Also, this is rather hard to manage for the app devs to provide such backports (to track various branches for old server releases).
ā¦