ownCloud development roadmap, future of ownCloud Classic versus OCIS

With OCIS beta now being released, I have some questions on the roadmap:

Can you already estimate when OCIS will reach stable status?

How /will ownCloud Classic continue? Will it be discontinued?

At the moment, ownCloud Classic is compatible to PHP 7.4 which will reach its EOL by the end of this year. So will ownCloud Classic get further compatibility to PHP 8.x soon?

Thank you and best regards,
Plastikschnitzer

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Hi Plastikschnitzer,

thanks for the questions.

oCIS stable status: This will happen later this year, probably during summer. We can not give a concrete day today because we want to make sure to release it with a high quality. As we are only at the beginning of the beta phase it is too early for concrete estimation.

How will ownCloud10 continue: That is answered in the FAQs here: Infinite Scale - the new cloud-native data platform (scroll down)
The bottomline is: Infinite Scale is a new product. It does not have an direct impact on the future of ownCloud10, which fulfills a different use case.

PHP8: Currently there are no plans to start working on PHP8 support. Even after the end of support upstream of PHP, there will be maintained versions of PHP 7.4 around from various distros. That should give plenty of time.
Please see Php version not compatible - #7 by jnweiger for more information.

best regards,

Klaas

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Thank you very much @dragotin for clarify on those things!

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To reemphasize the message about oC10: Here is the next version, released today: ownCloud Server 10.10.0 released

Enjoy!
Klaas

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Hello,

thanks for your answers, I was wondering about PHP 7.4 in a specific thread just like many other users, I guess.

If I understand well, oCIS / ownCloud 10 aren’t in conflict, oCIS won’t overshadow ownCloud 10.

I’m not sure to understand your position about PHP 8.0.
PHP 7.4 security fixes won’t be done by the official PHP team by the end of this year. It shouldn’t be up to the maintainers of distros to patch security fixes to PHP 7.4 because some softwares still require it.
It’s a bad habit and we’ll still have PHP 7.4 running in 10 years with all the security/migration problems :sweat:
Also, by the end of 2023, PHP 8.0 won’t be maintained anymore, my point is that time flies by and ownCloud 10 might lose users, because distros won’t package old PHP versions forever, at least they shouldn’t.
An interesting thread about PHP versions.

If oCIS was a replacement to ownCloud 10 it wouldn’t matter so much, we could wait for a migration documentation to move from ownCloud 10 to oCIS.

I quoted answers from this topic.

I understand your position but IMHO it’s not “good advises”.

a) Using PPA, even when it’s not coming from some unknown source, is not a good way to keep your system up to date nor secure. The maintainer could stop anytime its support, could inject backdoors or anything catchy, there could be packages conflicts, etc … At least on the Debian point of view I share. But the same problems could occur on Ubuntu.
b) Right, Ubuntu 20 will stick around for a while, but still PHP 7.4 shouldn’t be maintained once its EOL has been set officially.
c) Yes but see b)

My point is not to be a hassle, just could you consider adding PHP 8 support on the official roadmap to keep ownCloud 10 afloat ?
Thanks for the effort put in ownCloud.
Cheers.

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@dragotin @jnweiger
PHP 7.4 is EOL in less than two weeks. What are the official ownCloud recommendations for the various distributions to keep a safe PHP 7.4 environment? Or are we left to ourselves?

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I will just switch to Nextcloud. So fed up with this piece of software and now this … bye bye

For all ownCloud Community users we recommend the use of our official Docker images or Ubuntu 20.04. Known to deliver continous support are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and compatible Linux distributions as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and 15 during their respective lifetimes.
We have contracted experts to assure that our Docker above will always include a maintained and secured PHP version.

Sorry to see that this was your first and final contribution, you might want to also look at ownCloud Infinite Scale, RC2 is in the making right now.

Hello,

thanks for this answer.

IMHO, it’s not a good idea to let distro maintainers take care of a specific software, PHP maintainers I think are more relevant, if they drop the support of PHP7.4, we, as users, should follow.

So, does it mean that the Docker version will run a specific owncloud-core that’s compatible to up to date PHP (8.0, 8.1, etc …) ? And that if we want to install a standalone owncloud-core we have to stick with PHP7.4 ? It’s not really clear, plus it looks overkill to have experts to have a secure PHP version rather than upgrading to PHP8 …

What’s deceiving here is that a lot of people are truly concerned about ownCloud 10 and we get mixed signal on wether PHP8 will be supported in ownCloud 10 or not.

In the end, to me it looks like ownCloud Infinite Scale is meant to replace ownCloud 10 (which is fine but we need to know, so we can prepare migrations to oCIS or move to something else), but no one really communicates about it for whatever reasons.

Could any ownCloud official give a clear answer, will PHP8.0 be supported in ownCloud 10 ?

Thanks.

Btw, PHP7.4 is dead, long live PHP7.4 !

We provided a hopefully complete statement now: Announcement: ownCloud 10 and PHP Versions

There are people who specialize in longterm support. Having worked for a long time for a distro maintenance company, I can guarantee you that they have people at hand …

Our docker containers will always include a secure PHP version, that means exatly that. That will be the best way for most and our recommendation.

No need to be concerned about!
Holger

Hello,

thanks for your answer and the ownCloud 10 and PHP Versions announcement.

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