Last Monday we wanted to release our first security and bug fix release of
ownCloud 5 Community Edition.
Unfortunately the release 5.0.1 had some serious regressions.
Germany’s Heise (and their UK cousin The H) highlighted the issue with our 5.01 and 5.02 updates.
These updates to the Community Edition while fixing some issues —
triggered a problem with database indexes length limit with older MySQL
versions and a filesystem cache migration issue while upgrading from older
versions. Although we had been aware of the issues, and released the fix, we
thank Heise and The H for alerting users.
As you know ownCloud has the goal to be very flexible and to run a big
variety of servers from small Raspberry Pis to big clusters. The ownCloud
server runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, can use 5 different database systems,
support several different webservers, PHP versions and can be configured in
a lot of different ways. And users can also install 3rd party apps that also
bring in additional complexity.
All this has to be properly tested and documented. Unfortunately at least 2
serious problems slipped into the 5.0.1 release.
The first problem was that we overlooked a restriction of older MySQL
version to only allow indexes with a maximum of 767 bytes. This wasn’t
noticed by the developers because everybody used newer MySQL versions or
different databases. The second problem was an filesystem cache DB upgrade
bug which triggered the wrong upgrade routine for some users.
These problems were partly fixed with 5.0.2 and fully fixed with 5.0.3 which
we released 24 hours after 5.0.1
We are very sorry for the trouble that we might have caused our community
users and we are working very hard to prevent this bugs in the future.
The good news is that we’ve been working for some time to establish more and
more automated integration tests. These tests will be extended to cover
upgrade problems like this is the very near future.
Just a reminder:
We are on track to launch a commercially-supported ownCloud 5 Enterprise Edition in the second quarter.
