Staged roll out status information?

🍱 Features & apps
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1

The staged rollout process for new NC versions in the Stable channel seems to often be the subject of incomprehension and/or cause confusion.

As explained at https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/:

Stable

This channel delivers the latest feature releases ready for most users at minimal risk.
Note that Nextcloud does staged rollouts, making releases incrementally available to the user base over time. We are very careful about new major releases, usually only making them available after the first minor bug fix release. To update sooner to the new version, use the Beta channel. Around big releases the Beta channel delivers the new major version.

[…]

In practice, most bugfix releases are available within a week, major releases to a proportion of the users on release day in the Stable channel; we will increase that percentage usually to 100% after the first bugfix release.

However,

  • not everyone knows or remembers that it is the case

  • it can take longer for a new NC version to be available for your server than you could think or hope from the text above (for example NC 19.0.0 was released on 3 June and first bug release 19.0.1 on 17 July, and on 01 Aug NC 19 it is still not available to everyone in the Stable channel)

Could we envisage to

  1. Have a page showing up-to-date status information about any staged rollout under way in the Stable channel (and other channels?). This could just be added to the page https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/? Could be something very simple like:

NC 19.0.0. Undergoing staged rollout. Currently available to NN% of servers (as of today 2020-08-01)".

  1. In every announcement of a new release, insert prominently a short reminder such as

These new releases are made available under our usual staged rollout process. For explanations and up-to-date status, see https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/

Any thoughts?

1 Like
2

Hello @jospoortvliet,
Would that be possible to have confirmation that staged roll out of NC 19 is still ongoing - ie that it is normal that it is still not available in the stable channel for some NC18 instances?
My interpretation of the info given at https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/ is that under “usual” circumstances, NC 19 would have been made available to all NC 18 instances once NC 19.0.1 was released on 17 July, 3 weeks ago.
Thanks in advance. Cheers.

3

NC 19.0.1 has appeared over the last couple of days as an available update for my NC 18.0.7 server. Two and a half months after 19 was released, and a good month after 19.0.1.

Hopefully that means it has now been made available to everyone.

Looking forward to upgrading :slight_smile:

Any plan to provide more detailed status information in the future, for example at https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/?

4

Not really, but you can follow the status on github: https://github.com/nextcloud/updater_server