Why is 23.0.1 so heavily delayed?

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:

2 Likes

this is fine no need for excuses.

sounds like you didn’t spend a second to check my forum profile before you offended me without a reason.

Next time when you decide to attack somebody please try to understand the situation completely. if it happens I bump your car - I will tell you it’s worth no reaction as you have no contract with me - deal?

everybody has moral right to expect a damage to be recovered. the case I’m talking about is pretty easy - software provided by Nextcloud caused huge issues for many users - and the reaction was far not ideal.

ACK. I started using NC 18 months ago. I run 3 major upgrades with small issues (on two instances - I use one for testing). I have to admit I spend maybe 3-4 months to find a good setup for me, tested backup and restore, decided which apps to use and which not. Even two cases when client removed files or issues bad mtime was only annoying and caused some work - but there was no data loss. I agree same scenario with lot of users, business need might result in lot of stress - but even it’s possible to build a process to recover from such scenario (if you rely on software you may be you should start building this process from the beginning)

Fully agree… unfortunately at the moment it looks like there is no good testing at dev side… maybe they are overwhelmed with customer support, maybe the development is too fast… fact is - if a dev misses test case happening once in 3 years - no blame, when a dev misses a situation happening once in 3 minutes - bad mood…

longer testing periods might help… but majority of the users don’t wan to test, they want stable software - longer alpha/beta testing could just postpone uncovering the issues until there is no professional guidance like "users with Mac OS 123.654 please configure the client with this feature and run following test cases… "… Leaving “testing” to untrained users and hobby admins leads to exactly the situation we have: “tested” software is released to public stable channel and cause issues and data loss and in turn bad image for the product and the company

@tflidd and @wwe - so how long would you think the testingphase should take?
afaik the releaseschedule for every new major version sees 6 weeks of testing… including 3 beta test stages and 2 RC test stages until the final release (with a feature freeze on beta 1). so this IS quite a long time for testing regarding that we usually end up with 3 new major versions each year (some circumstance I personally was questioning since long)

PLUS we absolutely don’t know how hard the pandemic hit NC - devs. Like many other, bigger, companies are fighting this problem as well, offering less service, shrinking down their offers, shifting projects and all of that. And everyone here is freaking out about a postponed release?

@wwe I saw the discussion about the one nagging bug. And I do appreciate your qualified input there very much.
the bug looked solvable. But I’m no coding guy… Though somehow it really wasnt’t solved until the other day (didn’t look in there since then). I dunno why it’s still unsolved. Maybe they don’t have enough devs for it? I dunno. I can remember that especially this “virtual” seemed to be a lot harder to code than everyone expected and thus ending up in a way longer development for that feature. Maybe fixing the bug seems to be harder than everyone thought? But apart from that… this thread started asking why NC23.0.1 was so heavily delayed and now we’re discussing problems of some totally different app?

Do you remember when I asked here on this thread where the discussion would lead? Now we know. And to be honest: I don’t know any relevant piece of information more than from the beginning on. But well… this discussion left some of us in a bad mood, with bad feelings, of course. Was that the goal?

I can only repeat: I am sure that all devs do whatever they possibly can to offer a good product to us, regardless of “us” being user or customer.

2 Likes

Unlike Nextcloud I never encountered any problems with Apache, mysql or MariaDB.
I also think that when there is a missing database field after the upgrade of a vanilla NextCloud that doesn’t look like a problem with the environment. I’m using PostgreSQL for my single user instance. Because of the update problem, I don’t dare offer nextcloud as a service to my friends.

I would like to see fewer new features and more consolidation of the existing, knowing that this is far less interesting for developers. And this doesn’t just apply to NextCloud. It’s a worldwide featureitis virus that makes modern software more and more a pain in the ass.

But at least, I never had any data loss. Just got stuck on updates causing me to save all files locally, saving my mobile data (contacts and dates with MyPhoneExplorer), deleting the whole stuff and setting it up completely new.
That’s not something I would like to do when I had some or even many clients on my cloud. For me alone it’s not a not catastrophe, but pretty annoying.

root@cloud:~# ls -lt /var/log/installer
insgesamt 624
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   4096 Feb 11  2017 cdebconf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 127147 Feb 11  2017 initial-status.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    105 Feb 11  2017 lsb-release
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  17727 Feb 11  2017 hardware-summary
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  60878 Feb 11  2017 status
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     67 Feb 11  2017 media-info
-rw------- 1 root root  79115 Feb 11  2017 partman
-rw------- 1 root root 329602 Feb 11  2017 syslog
root@cloud:~# fs=$(df / | tail -1 | cut -f1 -d' ') && tune2fs -l $fs | grep 'Filesystem created'
Filesystem created:       Sat Feb 11 16:48:43 2017
  • Installed on 11.02.2017 in a Proxmox VM, which was moved to new hardware in the meantime and the virtual disk was increased from 512MB to 1024MB at some point in time.
  • Started with Nextcloud 13, currently Nextcloud 23.0.1
  • Two OS upgrades: From Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04.
  • One Maria DB upgrade 10.3 to 10.6
  • Several PHP upgrades, started with 7.2.XX, currently on 8.0.15

I have two users (me and my girlfriend) We use mainly the calendar, files and collabora. The sync client on multiple computers (Linux and Mac) and on our phones (Android).

How does this post help anybody?

Most likely it doesn’t help at all, just like most of the post before this one. But I thought: It’s Friday, the sun is shining, why not add something positive here… :wink: :slight_smile:

6 Likes

But this isn’t the analogy at all. A better analogy would be I gave YOU a free car as a gift, and then you had a problem changing the wheel, and expected me to come fix it for you, and got angry when I was busy fixing wheels on cars of people who had bought them from me.

2 Likes

Sorry, but to me this is just crazy.

“Backportbot” keeps adding Pull request after Pull request for 23.0.1 .
While I am still on 22, there are plenty users on 23 which sometimes
face some serious issues. And while the 23.0.1 Milestone has some 110
fixes in it there still is the decision to not fix them but have people
wait for even longer? Is 23.0.1 even worse the 23.0.0? Why cant’t they
draw a line, ship the fixes they have and then have another one follow
in maybe a coouple more weeks?
The way we work in our projects is: Fix the most critical and urgent
defects first. So my assumption is that the 110 most critical fixes are
already in? Or are you saying there are 110 minor fixes and the really
painful stuff is all still open? And that’s why nothing is being released?

I fully agree in term stability is the key - quality and stability is priority before new features. But the duration of the testing phase has low impact on the quality. Testing is in my eyes the most hardest part of software development - a tester must know and understand critical situations and force the software to break (say simulate bad network conditions and components outages) - which is not often the case if normal user do “testing” - they find these issues randomly and often can’t even describe them…

this fact doesn’t help while testing and neither it proofs development speed has decreased for some reason (pandemic-wise or projects load)

yes you did and you are right we had conflicts and didn’t produce any progress. I feel such discussions very useful (maybe we should start more generic thread) to understand the feelings, demands and problems of the users…

… and I still hope our lengthy discussions will somehow reach Nextcloud and motivate them into better communication… for me this missing feedback is main issue - if they are overwhelmed by the pandemic, lot of project, other priorities - it’s easier to align your reaction to the facts…

3 Likes

you are completely wrong - in your example you shared construction plans for a car but forget the brakes and my expectation is you help me to fix the damage happened to my car due to faulty construction plans by creating repair instructions…

please explain how my expectations are wrong?