The Freedombox guys are looking at Seafile as a replacement. I swapped my personal server over recently, and it seems much less janky.
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It's Looking Like Debian 9.0 Stretch Won't Support OwnCloud
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Originally posted by anda_skoa View Post
Ah, ok, that is not as bad it sounded then.
I guess it then comes down how often they release a major version.
If they do it once a year then skipping one would amount to not updating for two years, which would probably too long for most software.
But if they were on a 1 to 3 month cycle then the expectation to be able to skip at least every second major version would be reasonable IMHO.
Cheers,
_All opinions are my own not those of my employer if you know who they are.
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Originally posted by Ericg View PostDebian [...] strips out the bundled libraries that ownCloud makes modifications to and are bundling for a reason, thus introducing new bugs and problems.
For some insight, the according entry in the Gentoo Wiki might hold forth, and also this interesting blog post by a Gentoo developer flameeye, called Bundling libraries for despair and insecurity. He also discusses why people bundle and for what reasons they are usually wrong.
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Originally posted by Ericg View Post
Releases are done on a roughly 4-month schedule, subject to delays.
That's roughly three upgrades a year and with their track record of upgrades not working reliably probably not something sysadmins will want to do more than twice in the worst case.
Also makes their support time of 18 month ridiculous, since by then they would have released about 4 versions which you can't skip, but have to manually upgrade through all of them.
Cheers,
_
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Originally posted by gerddie View Post
Bundled libraries are a major pain in the lower back, and there are very good reason not to bundle libraries, especially for security reasons.
For some insight, the according entry in the Gentoo Wiki might hold forth, and also this interesting blog post by a Gentoo developer flameeye, called Bundling libraries for despair and insecurity. He also discusses why people bundle and for what reasons they are usually wrong.All opinions are my own not those of my employer if you know who they are.
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Originally posted by boltronics View PostWhat a frustrating mentality ownCloud seems to have in this case. It seems the ownCloud developers want to be able to update their app whenever they feel like, as opposed to whenever a new distro release is cut.
The problem is that people who use the Debian stable packages want that long term stability. They don't want libraries installed multiple times cluttering up their system, making library fixes more difficult to deal with and bloating packages by bundling everything together. They want their packages to have ideally been tested for months, not thrown together at the last minute and shipped with issues (which happened numerous times last year from my experience).
What I don't get is why so many web developers think they are so special that admins, package maintainers and other stakeholders should submit to their will, simply because they are developing a web application? It seems at times that they just don't have a clue, and instead of getting one, prefer to simply make trouble for everyone else "because all my cool web dev friends do it this way" or whatever the excuse is, so everyone else must be wrong. The nonsense has to stop.
OwnCloud (from the project's point of view) seems to require a similar special handling that FireFox requires with two exceptions: 1) The OwnCloud package doesn't need renaming and 2) OwnCloud major updades may not be skipped due to database incompatibilities (which is allowed in FireFox). OwnCloud developers have stated that they are fixing 2) starting with the (current) 9.0 release for (hopefully all) future releases.
The supported Debian version(s) provide OwnCloud 7.0.z so the maintainer(s) worked on packaging 9.y.z. Of course they want to provide a data migration path for their users and (to maybe some lesser extend?) be compliant to Debian packaging guidelines (more on that later). Also of course they don't want to package all intermediate major versions of OwnCloud (from the OwnCloud homepage: "As an extreme example, to upgrade from 7.0 all the way to 9.0, upgrade 7.0.x to 7.0.13, then upgrade to 8.0.11, 8.1.7, 8.2.4, then 9.0.1.") and do all the upgrade steps mentioned (I have not spent any time on understanding OwnCloud, so maybe it might be sufficient to package the core module if that is what is responsible for upgrading the database tables, encryption and format). Instead the maintainers changed some of the code to read and convert the 7.0 database format directly into 9.0 and of course that code wasn't perfect (they are humans after all). Basically every developer on the owncloud mailinglist that commented on this approach dissed it (I did not see any constructive response on how to improve the approach, only comments of the type "this must not be done because otherwise user data will be at risk" - but please remember that I only skimmed the archives).
Wrt. packaging rules, OwnCloud does seem to have some configurable values directly inside the code instead of dedicated config files. For the current developers changing this does not seem to be a priority but they do not mind someone providing patches as the project is open source.
So for me this doesn't look so much like a "we don't want anyone to threaten our business model" but more like a "we don't want users to risk their data with the Debian upgrade 7 to 9 upgrade code, even if that means they loose OwnCloud completely" (the last is my interpretation).
Corrections/additions welcome!
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Originally posted by NatTuck View PostThe Freedombox guys are looking at Seafile as a replacement. I swapped my personal server over recently, and it seems much less janky.
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Originally posted by Ericg View PostNot quite. OwnCloud explicitly does not support skipping versions during upgrades. If you are on version 8.0 and want to upgrade to the latest 9.0, you need to do 8.0->8.1->8.2->9.0. Debian, unfortunately, wants to let people go from 7.0 (or earlier) straight to 9.0, which is an explicitly unsupported usecase.
Originally posted by Ericg View PostDebian also lags behind on security updates
Originally posted by Ericg View Postand strips out the bundled libraries that ownCloud makes modifications to and are bundling for a reason
Originally posted by Ericg View PostWeb applications are the very peak of "Release early, release often."
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Darn it... typing this out one more time since my original reply got eaten when I hit post.
Edit: Or not. Stuck in a moderation queue without warning I guess.Last edited by boltronics; 29 March 2016, 08:59 AM.
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