Nextcloud server major upgrades, is it worth it?

[jospoortvliet]

@tflidd

We have so many repetitive topics, we need to consolidate a bit so that discussions don’t diverge too much. And we try to lead discussions in a way to improve things and to be constructive.

We don’t want to censor, there is a lot of criticism here and we need it to improve Nextcloud. Well, if it goes to out of hand just ranting or starting to insult people, we have to interact.

Agreed. The reality is just that there are conflicting needs and desires. In the end, what everybody wants is:

• 1 release/year at most
• but all features and bugfixes they want backported to automatically deployed minor releases
• and of course always supporting the latest PHP and other platform things
• and releases should never break

The features and bugfixes people want are wildly conflicting - as we know, some people value Nextcloud only for Groupware (people tell me they don’t use files at all) while others don’t use anything beyond Files and so on.

But beyond what people want, we also have the reality of engineering. If we do bigger releases they break more and are more risky. They also take longer, causing more downtime, due to more database changes. Another factor is platform support, databases and PHP in particular - if we do less releases, users will more often bump into issues with PHP for example. Right now we try to align with PHP versions, so that the latest Nextcloud supports the latest PHP and you can upgrade without having to worry about problems there. Still, as some distro’s are slow, some users are on an old PHP that we can’t support anymore and are a bit stuck. That would get worse with longer release cycles.

If you don’t see what the problem is with PHP, consider yourself lucky - if you have been stuck on an old version of PHP and Nextcloud, and suddenly get a much newer version of PHP and then couldn’t update Nextcloud at all - you DO know what I talk about. It’s a nightmare…

In that regard, we really try to make things easy. For example, hub 6 AKA 27.1 was specifically done in a way that wouldn’t make things harder - it is a very quick and light update, not a big, breaking change. PHP does ˜3 releases/year and we follow that, with the 27.1 being kind of a half extra release so we come to 3.5 releases this year

Anyhow, I can share tons of more insights, but right now, the ˜4 month cycle with ˜1 year support is the best balance we can find between getting features and fixes to users, keeping releases small, not overloading on updates, aligning with the platforms Nc runs on and working efficiently.

If you have issues with the updates and new versions, my tip: use the Nextcloud All-in-one. I recently migrated my personal Nextcloud from a basic LAMP stack to that, and it’s a delight. 99% of your issues are taken care off and updates are super smooth

Seriously, check that out.