Today we have branched off the release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 2018.08 release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily. Over the last 3 month many issues were resolved, alongside with some enhancements and new features. For all these changes we now feel it is time for them to get released. Before this will happen, we’d like to invite you, to test them and report back some rough edges and problems you encountered. We are especially interested in the experiences of people who are currently running the 2018.05 release of Friendica.

Some things you should be aware of before testing:

• The long awaited restructuring of the item table of the database will finally be included in this release. The needed changes and alterations of the database structure and content will take some time. Depending on the resources available on your system this can take hours or even days. The maintenance mode will inform you about the progress.
• The configuration structure is changed. Your old .htconfig.php file will still work, but you will get a notification in the admin panel with some hopefully explaining text on how to convert your settings to the config file. In some cases the encoding of the displayed text got mangled up, if you are suffering from such garbage you need to switch to the new config stile and set the correct encoding for the database.
• The .htaccess file is no part of the git repository anymore. Instead we now ship the .htaccess-dist file that you have to copy to the .htaccess location. This has the advantage that you can now customize the .htaccess file to meet your requirements. Please make a copy of your old .htaccess file should you have made any changes and restore the file after the switch to the RC branch from the backup or the distributed file. Without a working .htaccess file your node will probably not work!

How to help testing the release candidate?

Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from github. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2018.08-RC during the pull. in both repositories You just need to checkout this branch with a

git checkout 2018.08-rc

and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker at github or the Friendica support or admin forums.

For a complete list of changes, please have a look at the file listing of this pull request at github.

Should the DB update process get stuck

If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

./bin/console dbstructure update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.

One user reported problems during the update of the database using MySQL 5.7 getting the error message Creating index 'PRIMARY' required more than 'innodb_online_alter_log_max_size' bytes of modification log. Please try again.from MySQL. If you encounter this problem, please try the following:

• increase the config value mentioned in the error message above,
• execute this command in your mysql console: update config set v=1278 where k="post_update_version";
• after this execute the command bin/console postupdate.