[Kolab-devel] Upgrade report 3.1 to 3.2 on Debian Wheezy

Enrico Tagliavini enrico.tagliavini at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 19:57:30 CET 2014 

A good start might be adding a very big (as in easy to see) "Setup a
backup" at the end of the Installation guide, with a brief but with
strong arguments about why you should do a backup. The backup and
restore section has very useful technical tips, but it is a bit hidden
in the administration guide. I bet a lot of inexperienced people never
open that web page at all. So making the backup page more visible
*and* spending few lines explaining why backup is not an option. I
think a link to the same page in the very main page
http://docs.kolab.org/ would be of help.

If the page has more visibility hopefully you'll also get more
contribution to the doc itself.

Any thoughts on this?

Kind regards
Enrico

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 5:14 PM, Daniel Hoffend <dh at dotlan.net> wrote:
> Hi Enrico
>
> infact I'm doing ZFS snapshots of my virtual kolab servers thats why I could
> directly rolled back to 3.1, cloned my server and tested the upgrade to
> find, fix and report bugs.
>
> But I've seen people on IRC and the Mailinglist who're not that experienced
> or have the ability to do so and had to reinstall their servers because they
> were not that experienced (mostly smaller and private installations I
> guess). I know that not having tested backups and then playing early
> adopters on new releases is something they should not really consider. I
> just have the feeling that all this negative press about unstable release (I
> know even those users are doing it wrong :-)) is bad.
>
> Anyway I hope we'll all learn from this. I really would appreciate if the
> kolab team would introduce a release candidate next time on the "devel"
> mailling list, so we can help testing before the final 3.x release gets
> announced on the official announce list.
>
> --
> Daniel
>
> ------ Originalnachricht ------
> Von: "Enrico Tagliavini" <enrico.tagliavini at gmail.com>
> An: "Daniel Hoffend" <dh at dotlan.net>; "Kolab development coordination"
> <devel at lists.kolab.org>
> Gesendet: 12.03.2014 18:02:14
>
> Betreff: Re: [Kolab-devel] Upgrade report 3.1 to 3.2 on Debian Wheezy
>
>> Hi Daniel,
>>
>> Just have a point about "The users that have the joy of snapshotting
>> their mailserver, upgrade and rollback if it breaks is rare I guess".
>>
>> That's an invalid argument. You (not referred to you as Daniel, but as
>> the general Kolab user) should do a periodic backup. Software (and
>> hardware) can fail at any time, and there is really no way to prevent
>> this at 100%. So if you don't snapshot LVM / btrfs / zfs / your DB /
>> whatever before updating you are doing it wrong.
>>
>> That said I agree with you about Kolab 3.2 being less stable than
>> desired. It happens and we should learn something from this to have
>> better release in the future. I have complete trust in the Kolab
>> community and contributors this will happen.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Enrico
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Daniel Hoffend <dh at dotlan.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Hi Thorsten
>>>
>>>  yes those 2 hotfixes made it into the obs repos. Couple days ago Jereon
>>>  updated the pykolab package when I'm checking the changelog in obs.
>>> Maybe
>>>  this fixed a couple pykolab bugs like the empty amavisd.conf on centos
>>>  systems during "setup-kolab mta".
>>>
>>>  I haven't had anytime to do any more tests in the last weeks. But when I
>>>  followed the mailing list I see lots of people complaining about the new
>>>  cyrus version. With changes like the cyrus ldap lookup patch it just
>>> doesn't
>>>  feel like a "drop-in" update for a groupware.
>>>
>>>  tbh (and this is just my opinion).
>>>
>>>  The upgrade procedures feels a bit rough and more like "testing in the
>>>  wild". Kolab Team is announcing a new 3.2 version (and people trust you
>>> and
>>>  think it's stable). When you look closer it feels really unstable and
>>>  untested. It began with 100% cpu look of kolabd, the missing upgrade
>>>  commands on debian packages (which i fixed in obs), the outdated mysql
>>>  initial file (while new user installs a non-working installation of
>>> kolab),
>>>  empty amavids.conf and a couple other initial bugs that prevented new
>>> users
>>>  from enjoy kolab and/or old users getting frustrated with the upgrade
>>>  process and the hickups. (I personally still run 3.1)
>>>  The users that have the joy of snapshotting their mailserver, upgrade
>>> and
>>>  rollback if it breaks is rare I guess, that's why
>>>
>>>  Tbh, the next time kolab announces a new version I really would like to
>>> see
>>>  a Release Candite announcement (like the 3.x version is ready for
>>> testing in
>>>  the Kolab:Development Repo), then focus a bit on fixing the bugs that
>>>  getting reported and after some time call it stable and move it to the
>>>  upcoming 3.x repo.
>>>  Maybe in the next weeks or month i find the time to digg into 3.2 again
>>> and
>>>  upgrade my system.
>>>
>>>  I just hope that you don't loose the trust the community puts into kolab
>>>  cause of unstable releases. Not everybody, especially small/private
>>>  installations don't ability to upgrade, rollback or whatever. This will
>>> just
>>>  lead to unhappyness and mailling list posts.
>>>
>>>
>>>  --
>>>  Regards
>>>  Daniel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  ------ Originalnachricht ------
>>>  Von: "Torsten Grote" <torsten at kolab.org>
>>>  An: devel at lists.kolab.org
>>>  Gesendet: 11.03.2014 11:30:38
>>>
>>>  Betreff: Re: [Kolab-devel] Upgrade report 3.1 to 3.2 on Debian Wheezy
>>>
>>>>  Hi Daniel,
>>>>
>>>>  thanks a lot for your fixes and patches and for pushing things into the
>>>>  Updates repository.
>>>>
>>>>  On Wednesday 19 February 2014 00:10:59 Daniel Hoffend wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>   I hope the 2 fixes mentioned above will make it into the 3.2:Updates
>>>>>   section soon.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>  Do you know if this already happened and an upgrade runs through
>>>> smoothly
>>>>  now?
>>>>
>>>>  Kind Regards,
>>>>  Torsten
>>>>
>>>>  --
>>>>  Torsten Grote
>>>>  Kolab.org Community Manager
>>>>
>>>>  e: torsten at kolab.org
>>>>  w: https://Kolab.org
>>>>
>>>>  pgp: 274D 4F97 Torsten Grote
>>>>  _______________________________________________
>>>>  devel mailing list
>>>>  devel at lists.kolab.org
>>>>  https://lists.kolab.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
>>>
>>>
>>>
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