Why is 23.0.1 so heavily delayed?

I only got it via beta channel on my test instance. And it is also not yet offered on the official download page and on the GitHub release page. But wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip already downloads 23.0.1. I think it’s save to say that this is the official release. :slight_smile:

Btw… Same goes for 22.2.4 for those who don’t want to upgrade to 23 yet… although those are probably rather a minority in this thread :wink:

Anyways… Happy upgrading! :slight_smile:

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This was odd… I am on 22.2.3 and suddenly saw a notification for 22.2.4. I though i just check for os updates before i do the update and it found some redis 5.3.6+4.3.0-1 update. I did the update and needed an reboot. Now the nextcloud webupdater still have the notification for the 22.2.4… but it is gone under STABLE channel.

If i go beta it finds 22.2.4 RC3

Where did the 22.2.4 under STABLE channel go? :-/

this is a major issue in this project - customer are divided in two categories - paying customers and free. Nothing is wrong to do so if you clear define your statement: your customer don’t count a penny until you buy a contract

take a look at the log4j guy - he works 22h/day to fix a problem for a project he was never paid for:

Momentan arbeitet Volkan Yazici 22 Stunden pro Tag – ohne dafür nur einen einzigen Cent zu sehen.

Source: Nach Log4j: Warum Open-Source-Projekte nachhaltig werden müssen | heise online

definitely nothing one could expect from nobody but this shows the difference between people who trust and believe in open source and their project and other who only use this as marketing label!

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to make that perfectly clear: it was only MY personal opinion. I have no connections to NC.

And I think you’re wrong for most of the collaborators there and here harm by claiming they wouldn’t trust and believe in what they do.

there’s several proof that NC DOES things for their community users (this has been discussed as well here up and down)!

come on @wwe whats up with you? are you in anti-mood today? :wink:

could we please end this discussion now?

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While I agree with you that communication can certainly always be improved, I think you’re exaggerating here. And I simpley don’t belive that the developers or the Nextcloud GmbH don’t care about their customers or users or whatever you want to call people who use their product for free or even earn money with it, without ever contributing back in any meaningful way. A product which is btw. completely open source and can be used, modified and redistributed without any restrictions.

Also, the comparison with Log4J does not fit here, because If anyone, it’s the people that are using
a product for free or even build a business around it, whithout contributing back, that do not care. These people and especially the ones that only come here to complain (I know that you are not one of them) are not much better, than all these companies that use Log4J in their commercial products, and never gave back a cent to the developer or the Apache Foundation.

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definitely. especially the handling of desktop client 3.4.0 I’m really disappointed…

I don’t do either… but looking at this thread and few others 1 2 shows similar picture - information flow from Nextcloud GmbH to the community is very limited - I would expect the vendor to take part in such important generic discussions…

I’m sorry if my word are not clear: my idea was to show the huge motivation of the log4j developer who works all throughout the day for free in opposite to Nextcloud which seems financially successful and still don’t mind completely fix the catastrophic issue discussed in 1 or at least don’t share it with the community. I’m wondering if some of the paying customers where hit by the issue and how they solved it? I can’t imagine they performed a server restore…

I guess they don’t use always the latest versions and features. But I don’t know anyone who has an enterprise contract, so i’ts only a guess.

Maybe it’s not that easy for them to solve… And I also get the impresson that many of the issues with the desktop client mainly appear on Windows together with Virtual Drive, which relies on features provided by Microsoft. At least there were fewer issues before they intoduced that feature. Personally, I never had issues like that with any version of the desktop client, neither on Linux nor on Windows. But I use mainly Linux and never used Virtual Drive, so I don’t know… But maybe they need better Windows developers, perhaps conceptual mistakes were made or maybe the documentation and support from Microsoft is poor and therefore they struggle to integrate it reliably. Most likely it is a combination of more than one factor. Anyway I can understand that you are frustrated. I just wanted to put the whole thing in perspective. And as you said yourself: You can’t really expect someone to work 24/7 like the Log4j dev does. :wink:

windows 11 here on 1 x desktop and 2 x laptops, heavily reliant on windows sync with the 3.4.2 client, zero issues before or after the 23.0.1 update, I do make use of virtual files too on one of the laptops to save space, still working fine so far after 24 hours

Maybe it leads to the point that the developers start testing their new releases before letting them out to the public?
And when I say “testing” I mean REAL testing; on a new machine; on a machine with an older version of NextCloud and so on - just professional testing, and not of he kind: “When it compiles it’s finished.”
OK, that may lead to even more delay. But for my part, I am more interested in working software than in as many updates as possible.

I am using NextCloud for years now and I can only remember one single upgrade that didn’t end up in a complete new installation and configuration.
Right now my (Linux) client tells me that V23.0.1 is out, but when I go to my server it tells me, that V23.0.0 is the current version. If not even these basic things work, how can one recommend NextCloud to anyone who just need a working tool for their synchronization purposes.
As of now, Nextcloud is a nice toy for nerds that have plenty of time to play around.

they did. There even is always at least one official RC to be tested before release. The question is: why don’t enough user take part in it? or even more specific: where have YOU been when it came up to betatesting or rc-testing?

NC isn’t a software just for rookies… you need to know what you do, when and where. I wouldn’t recommend it as a install & forget software. it needs to be maintained permanently. And no, you don’t need to be a “nerd”… If you can’t do it yourself let others do the stuff for you… either by chosing the right install-procedure or by buying support (like in: there are hosters offering preinstalled instances)

no every kind of OS was affected Windows with/without VFS and Linux (unsure about Macs). Jospoortvliet confirmed they don’t use Windows lot but the issue hit even their employees.

But the main point is not this issue happened - better testing may or may not have prevented this, the biggest issue was almost not existent problem management! the only official guy participating in this forum and taking all the bad mood was Jospoortvliet - a marketing guy without deep technical understanding - and later when the size of the problem was recognized there was no real push to fix it… only the client engineer published few basic attempts to reset invalid date to current time. at least in my case all broken files still existed as older versions - it can’t be such hard to create a script/describe manual procedure to mass recover existing file versions based on specific criteria…

but back to the current topic: I really hope this weeks without updates result from learning and better internal testing before updates become public.

Hm… Did you see this? https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/Fix-bug-invalid-modification-date

yes I know this script and worked through the script but I found no attempt to recover original mtime… it only iterates through DB and files… additional flaw is it doesn’t touch files in case DB mtime deffers from file system mtime…

mtime might be not the most important data but depending on the files e.g. your family pictures bad mtime could be really annoying

Maybe this PR solves this limitation? update mtime with the mtime from the database by szaimen · Pull Request #22 · nextcloud-gmbh/mtime_fixer_tool_kit · GitHub

Feel free to test this out by downoading the script from here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/szaimen/mtime_fixer_tool_kit/enh/noid/update-mtime-with-mtime-from-database/solvable_files.sh

(Disclaimer: I didn’t test if my changes work)

Okay I tried but it seems like the mtime is always lost: in the files and the database. So the only way to restore it is from backup. See update mtime with the mtime from the database by szaimen · Pull Request #22 · nextcloud-gmbh/mtime_fixer_tool_kit · GitHub

in some maybe not all situation there is a way to recover the mtime from versions file (or it’s DB record).

I didn’t find time to build reliable recovery procedure from this information as I’m not an expert in mysql but it should work as following:

  • find files with invalid mtime
  • find the most recent version (if many) of the file which has valid mtime
  • perform one of the possible recovery options:
    1. safe: touch the file with valid mtime (and remove version in 2nd step)
    2. storage efficient: move version file to the original location and overwrite bad file
  • perform occ files:scan all

additional sugar:

  • compare the version file you use for recovery with the file in the system (diff/checksum) - AFAIK the contents are unchanged, so file contents and versions should be same
  • remove newer versions having invalid mtime (there are github reports when upload with invalid mtime happened multiple times)

I didn’t investigate further - NC devs might know from the top of the head - i think oc_filecache table is not separated by user so if collect the information from DB you don’t need to iterate over each user to identify and recover the files, it should work in one go…

The idea to restore the mtime from versions sounds good to me in general!

Feel free to add it as enhancement idea to the repo: Issues · nextcloud-gmbh/mtime_fixer_tool_kit · GitHub so that the maintainers can have a look if they are able to implement this.

About the original question on 23.0.1.

Do not know if you’ve seen this:

So this release could be skipped

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A customer is someone who pays for something, there are not two tiers of customers, there are users, and there are users who are also the customers of Nextcloud Gmbh.

I have no connection to the company, I have my own small company where we use Nextcloud, for free (for now). As my way of appreciating the project I have submitted and had accepted the occasional pull request, and attempted to supply high quality bug reports on github.

May I ask what you have done to support the project so far that gives you the moral right to make such demands?

I can tell you now, without the paying tier of users, Nextcloud development will slow considerably, so you better hope they keep making those paying customers happy.

I’m using it from the beginning and had only once a problem with an app that was not ready for the new version yet. So experiences can be very different, some setups and some functions and apps are much more problematic than others.

I don’t think that they take it easy like that. It is hard to test everything for everybody.

However, problems shouldn’t happen and to blame everytime that it is free software and you don’t pay for it doesn’t count either. With that, we need to test Nextcloud ourselves. But to run Nextcloud we need Apache, oh that is free software too, so we have to test this as well. MariaDB, …, Linux? At some point you want to just use the software, if you have to do all the debugging and fixing, you never finish.

Question is, how can we improve that. On one side the community, that can do certain testing, give feedback etc., and also the company.

Regarding new features, perhaps keep them longer or more clearly as a alpha/beta feature that has to be actively enabled. It’s no problem if the community helps to test, but they should be aware of it and perhaps not use productive setups, and it would be helpful what has been tested and what still needs to be tested. Like for new features, if the developers didn’t have any Mac systems, some Nextcloud users with many Mac-systems in use could be happy to do certain tests within their systems.

:+1:

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