The first release candidate of ownCloud 8.1 is ready for testing. This release will bring many performance improvements, Encryption 2.0 and much more. If you’re an avid ownCloud user, this is the time to test the upcoming release and make sure it can deal with your specific installation. Get the release on the ownCloud website.
What Needs Testing?
Major areas of improvements in ownCloud 8.1 include reliability under heavy load and more complicated deployment scenarios, a much more robust encryption system and better performance. These are areas where your focus would be most appreciated!
More specifically, we would like to call on you for help testing the following:
- Encryption migration
- External SMB storage
- Client syncing and sharing (obviously)
- Functionalities that involve mailing
- Functionalities that involve certificate handling (S2S with imported certs, Appstore, etc.)
It would also be great if you could test updating with production data – of course, it would be a wise idea to do a backup beforehand!
There is still a number of known issues that are being worked on which you can find using this github link. Most of these issues are being reviewed and are getting ready to be merged. They are almost all corner cases which are very unlikely to hinder testing or minor polishing changes that are not yet added.
Why Do We Need Your Help With Functional Testing?
While ownCloud has unit tests on the code and employs tools for automated testing, nothing can truly replace functional end user testing. A wide variety of scenarios and setups are possible with a technology like ownCloud, creating the need for wide spread testing.
What happens when a user uploads files to a shared folder while it is being renamed by another user? What happens when you share an encrypted file to another user who trashes it, recovers and shares it to a third user who then puts it in a folder shared with you? It is complicated scenarios like these with which we need your help.
What happens if you do these things on a QNAP Nas? On a Raspberry Pi? On a cluster with 6 database and 3 LDAP servers using S3 storage? When under heavy load by tens to hundreds of users simultaneously accessing the same folder? When shared from one ownCloud server to another?
We need your creativity! Let’s find ways to do the things that the ownCloud developers never thought of. Does ownCloud handle them as expected? Great. If not, let us know! You can check our issue submission guidelines and report the problem!
We wrote an article a while back with more background on testing for the beta of ownCloud 7, you can refer to it for more tips and ideas.
Now go get your testing packages!