Version 0.19.X Deployment
Hello world!
I’m sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.
The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.
We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.
Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.
Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.
One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.
| Version | Release Date |
|---|---|
| 0.19.0 | 2023-12-15 |
| 0.19.1 | 2023-12-20 |
| 0.19.2 | 2024-01-10 |
| 0.19.3 | 2024-01-24 |
For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.
While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.
-jelloeater85
Too bad upstream Lemmy development didn’t adapt. The early 0.19 releases left several big instances hanging with severe bugs leaving them practically unusable.
In the developers defense, there are some bugs that don’t appear until a a certain workload threshold is crossed. It’s entirely possible for code to pass all tests and yet break when under heavy load in the real world (which can be difficult to simulate).
Yeah many bugs are difficult to catch, but the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.
YOLO-driven development
The testing in production development
Everyone has a test enviroment, some are lucky to have a separate production enviroment
That’s what Mastodon developers seem to do but ahead of formally releasing new versions and on their own instance only:
Lemmy devs have pushed RCs to lemmy.ml in the past.