The future of OwnCloud (PHP-version)

Hi all,

currently I am using OwnCloud on my shared-hosting webspace and everything works fine.
As OwnCloud will be switching from PHP to Go next year, I wonder how long the
PHP-version of OwnCloud will be receiving security updates.

It would be great if someone from OwnCloud could send a comment about this matter.

I would really like to continue using OC on my shared-hosting webspace, but I think that the Go-version would not be compatible with this. The last resort would be Nextcloud, but I am not really satisfied with the software quality at these days (they focus on more and more new features instead of fixing the existing bugs in the basic functions).

Best regards,
Cryptoman

Hello,

I didn’t hear/read yet that PHP would be dropped for Go, do you have any links indicating that ?
Anyway, as far as I know Go, it’s just a binary (I guess it would be cross compiled) you could put on your server, so it shouldn’t be such a hassle to use it.
Cheers.

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I doubt it will be any time soon. Until they have customers paying for them to support the PHP version, I doubt they can drop it. Even if they push the customers to move their installations to Go, they’ll need a lot of time. Note that the Go version should have similar features, at least for those customers.

I guess the development of new features will eventually stop, but I doubt they’ll stop providing fixes and security updates any time soon.

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And this is probably the reason why there is no official communication about this yet. There are just too many unknown unkowns at the moment.

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Hey,

i think the following announcements / links by the ownCloud team could give some insights into this topic:

Based on the articles above i did a few searches at https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues with keywords like “Nexus” or “Infinite Scale” and found the following posting by @DeepDiver1975 in https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/36232 which seems to answer the question by @cryptoman:

The next generation if owncloud will be called ‘ownCloud Infinite Scale’ and will focus on pure file sync and share. The architecture will be microservice based and will rely on the Go Language.

This new architecture has impact on the deployment model and a deployment on a php webspace is out of scope.

We are in the very initial phase of this project and the classic ownCloud project will be alive for a few years.

Please find more info about ocis in e.g. https://github.com/owncloud/ocis

I hope this answers your question - please raise further questions on https://central.owncloud.org

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Are there any updates?

In https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/37703 I read

DeepDiver1975 commented 3 days ago
And please keep in mind: oc10 is soon EOL. Why waste energy on such things.

What in detail does this comment mean? I didn’t find any news at https://owncloud.org/news/, so is there somebody who could give some insights/plans/roadmaps?

That’s indeed a good question, oC10.5 was expected in may but I guess that due to the world situation it got delayed. Nevertheless I couldn’t find any new version in the future such as an oC 11 in the release schedule.

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That might sound harsh, but from a developer point of view he is kind of right as there is not much more new feature development going into oC10.

However, 10.5 is going to be released very soon. This enables PHP 7.4 support on Ubuntu 20.04, so
for the next 2 years you’re going to be set. After that it is very likely though you’re going to have to migrate to oCIS.

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Hi @eneubauer

thanks for the clarification, I thought there would be an oC 11 before oCIS, I don’t know why :'D
Sorry I load my question gun !

If I understand well, oC10.5 will have support until 2022 ?

Is oCIS expected in 2020 ?

Is there a migration process to move from oC 10.5 to oCIS ?

Thanks.

Hey,

i would like to know this as well. I think this could clarify what “soon” in the posted comment mean:

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Hey,

i just have found on https://github.com/owncloud/core/wiki/Maintenance-and-Release-Schedule that it seems ownCloud 10 is scheduled to be EOL in 2021-05

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Hello @tom42,

thanks for the information ! If there is no oC 11 with the same PHP core it will be short in time to change the infrastructure to the new oCIS which is not officialy out there.

Hi,
Sorry I forgot to reply to this one.

There will definitely be a migration process (I will have to use it myself).

The first betas have already been released. But when the final 1.0 release will happen is still not clear, I think they wanted to get it out this year. However I didn’t really follow on what the latest news in oCIS development are. So take my information on this with a grain of salt.

How long ownCloud 10.x (>=10.5) will exactly be supported is not my decision. However, as that version supports Ubuntu 20.04 and PHP7.4, it should be easy to support it until at least 2022.

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Hey @eneubauer

thanks for your answer !

I hope we get more official informations about oC 10.5, I wait for this version since a while :'D and also about oCIS.

Good week.
Cheers.

I see ownCloud 10.5 was released today, see https://download.owncloud.org/community/?sort=time&order=desc

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Ouh noice ! I checked this morning but it’s still not official to me: https://owncloud.org/download/#owncloud-server

or the guy maintaining owncloud.org is on holiday :wink:

For previous releases, the release candidates were published under “Testing” on owncloud.org as well. For the current 10.5 there was not one single RC on the download page …

ahah that might be it :'D

I’ll wait for some official updates before to test upgrades.

Be careful the file is still being prepared. The download might be corrupt. Double check the checksum with a couple of fresh downloads once the official channels have announced it.

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Thank you for this advice. So the packages in the directory linked above are auto-generated and/or subject to fail?