We have released the first beta of Nextcloud 24!

2 posts were split to a new topic: Bug Hunters group created. Volunteer for testing and reporting breakage

Why is that a facepalm?

How can people beta test if they don’t know what they’re beta testing? Are our devs all from Microsoft?!?!

a perfect lesson on how to NOT pick any quote out of it’s context.

Maybe everyone who is willing to test should just test his personal business/use case, because that would help you to identify problems for your own environment, caused e.g by a regression, and therefore already provide a very good quality assurance, and as a bonus you would surely stumble upon one or the other changes such as new features and functionalities yourself…

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Upgrading to beta 1 went with only one error. Now we already have beta 2 Tried that but got a message on extra files.

I understand that this is a common issue. I find lots of posts in the forum.

I think there is a place for a more detailed “How to” or a passage in the manual about how to solve this common problem. And at a level so a beginner on Linux can follow. As NC is used by a lot of amateurs like me I think more basic instructions would be appreciated and increase the usability.

After sudo -s I could cd to /var/www/ and identified the file and folder.
Should I just delete the file (rm?) and the folder (rm -r)? Or should I move them to another place?
For the moment I solved it by returning to my snapshot.

I now upgraded to the Beta2 but this failed with error
InvalidArgumentException: Column “oc_bookmarks”.“url” is type String, but exceeding the 4.000 length limit.

And while complaining about unclear instructions. When I wanted to add the missing indices I tried the instruction given in NC itself to run “occ db:add-missing-indices” but although I was root and issued the command in the /var/www/nextcloud/ I got an error message Command ‘occ’ not found, but there are 21 similar ones. So I needed to run the command “sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices”. I would propose that you give this instruction instead.

I am a fan of NC but I think a more client oriented information would help a lot. Many users are amateurs.

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I must honestly say that I don’t quite understand the idea behind this strategy either and I also doubt that this is the right strategy. But in the end, it is the decision of Nextcloud GmbH how they wanna handle this…

Personally, I don’t care much, because I have simply adapted my strategy of how to deal with upgrades to the strategy of how Nextcloud GmbH is dealing with their announcements. This means that my personal “beta” testing takes place between the initial release and the first point release, which is perfectly fine to me, given Nextcloud’s fast release cycles.

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Amateurs shouldn’t deal with beta versions at all. And if they want to learn and participate, they should run a separate test instance. Matter of fact everybody should run a seperate test instance. Also there are many appliances like NCP, Nextcloud AIO, the Snap package etc out there. And there is a reason why most of the appliances are lagging a bit behind with upgrades of the dependencies and sometimes even with Nextcloud versions. If you’re an amateur and just want to use a product, you shouldn’t use bleeding edge or even beta versions. Use either one of the appliances or if you want to install it manually use Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS and the PHP, MariaDB releases from the repositories of the distro. Also do not upgrade Nextcloud before the first point release.

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:roll_eyes: And you still didn’t answer my question.

Without knowing what features have been added, how are beta testers supposed to test the new features?

Don’t reply with vacuous rhetorical statements, just explain why keeping features secret is fine when we’re asked to beta test the secret features.

@DarkSteve i think THIS following comment gives all the answers needed

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But it doesn’t give all the answers needed. Testing in your own environment is fine and dandy but it won’t tell you what bugs or changes have been fixed/made in the software that actually need testing.

if you’ll find bugs in a beta you should flag them… regardless of what you found. and where. and why. You most prolly don’t know which part of the code was changed or not.

You even don’t know that if you don’t find any bugs if that is good or if you have just searched bad. Could be that bazillion lines of code has been rewritten without you noticing it.

I still don’t know why we need to discuss it here… there has been good suggestions already on how to proceed for really interesteed betatesters.

I’m a beta tester. I beta test most versions of nextcloud. I’d like to see more transparency so something like this doesn’t happen again.

I’d like to remind everyone the problem above happened with the built-in code server, so it wasn’t just a problem with docker/external collabora servers.

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If you read my post I mentioned that I use snapshot and it is on a test instance. If NC does not want amateurs to do the beta-testing why do they post about it on the forum? I do understand that their primary aim with that is to rule out any issues on existing setups. I know many are eager to test new functions but for that you can wait until the basic things are OK. I agree -stop complaining.

I think there is no clearcut limit between amateurs and pros. In my case I run a production server for a church and there are 50 users. But I am not an IT or Linux expert. It is actually on NC22.2.5. I will probably upgrade now to NC23 as it works well on my test instance.

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Yeah sure, and I would consider me even more an amateur, because I only run an instance for me and my girlfriend.

This is the way! :slight_smile:

That’s a mistery, to me too, like their decission to not annouce new features before the release date. But it doesn’t bother me that much… :wink: We have released the first beta of Nextcloud 24! - #25 by bb77…

It takes a special sort of arrogant stupidity to assert that betas are not for amateurs.
Firstly, the difference between amateurs and professionals is whether they get paid, not how knowledgeable they are. Some of the best stuff comes from amateurs, who can afford the time to do stuff that isn’t economic for professionals.
Secondly, the whole point of beta testing is to assess how well the thing works. The user’s expertise (or lack of it) is an important part of that test. However well a feature works, if it is incomprehensible or even difficult for the user, that’s relevant and needs testing.
This is even more true for RCs.
To conceal changes from testers is a truly stupid idea. We are not doing user acceptance testing. This is system testing.

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@hairydog

i think BB wasn’t referring to amateurs vs pros on a businesslevel. I think he meant that someone with more experience (“pro”) would know what to do if they stumbled across a major bug which would kill the instance than someone with no experience (“amateur”).

remember: We on the forum have to deal with users who don’t even know how to use commandline, coming from the windows-world.

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Com’on people, calm down, we are all on the same boat…

I’m still on V21 on the server side, because the serious shortcomings, first with Collabora and later with the Sync client, were a no-go for me. On the other hand, I have tested the various clients and found them to be good, so they are all up to date.

So everyone has his own strategy. You have to decide for yourself where to put your resources, in testing or in troubleshooting and fixing in production. In my opinion, the starting position is clear: If you don’t test, be it betas or official releases, server, clients or apps, it’s basically your own fault if serious errors occur in your production configuration. And focusing on the new functions is very short-sighted IMHO, because precisely these are also prominently examined in the internal tests, I assume.

I know what functions I and my users use and if something is wrong in this area, it’s a no-go for me to update - period.

And last but not least: If a countdown for an official announcement has been set, it should also be clear to everyone that Nextcloud people don’t want to blab out things in advance…

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Splitting hairs, because of my imperfect wording, does not contribute anything at all to the actual topic. And If you had really read all my posts in this thread, you could have comprehended, that we basically have the the same opinion about the actual topic. I just look at it more pragmatic and less emotional.

Shouldn’t it be fixed before new versions are released?

What extactley should be fixed? Did you find a bug in NC24? If so, you should report it on GitHub. That’s the whole point of public beta releases, leting users who have time and want to help, install it and report bugs back to the developers. Bugs are to be expecded in beta releases and the first beta release of NC24 is what this thread is all about… Btw. NC 24 has reached release candidate status in the meantime…

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