Unable to update to unstable version

[digitaLumberjack]

@sharmuta pal i'm sorry to inform you that your 5 bucks are not paying people working on recalbox, only server that host forums, stable updates, the website, and so on.
Those same server that allows you to spit on our work with your message.

For your concern, you will be able to demand anything if you pay me the days I spend on recalbox. As I bill my clients 600$ a day, and as I worked the whole weekend on those s**ts that are not together as you said, I'll wait for your 1200$ donation, and then we will talk.

Until then, if you cannot help us with your skills, and I bet you can't, please be patient.

[zabi]

Dear @digitaLumberjack,

I can absolutely understand your feelings at the time you read @sharmuta's post and hence can relate to the way you articulated your response.

Having said that, your answer can be misinterpreted and read as if @sharmuta's donation (and potentially other people's donations as well) are somewhat taken for granted and not appreciated. Additionally, it can also be misunderstood that we are not open to feedback, as harsh as it may be.

I believe you will agree with me that this project wouldn't be where it is today without donations and strong community effort. Yet this does not mean that your invaluable work is not appreciated.

Furthermore, I do agree with the underlying feedback that was (badly) communicated by @sharmuta. Some people relay on the unstable version as it supports the native BT and Wifi capabilities of the RPi 3 and hence it is unfair on them to wait this long when an alternative option is not available and no ETA is announced. No one says it is only on you to fix it, rather I would suggest to explain in your answer why this takes the timeframe it does and what could potentially be done as a community to support you (and the team) in order to expedite the process.

I hope this will correct the communication and be viewed by the readers of this thread as a non-typical interaction in our great community.

[digitaLumberjack]

@zabi thank you for your intervention.

Of course donations are vital to recalbox and we clearly are lucky to have such a good community.
But as I already said, donation do not cover servers bill entirely (and there are not only servers to pay). And we never asked more that what we have now, because it is already very useful.

We pay the community loyalty back with hours we spend on working on recalbox, and the only thing we have in mind is "what can we do to make user enjoy recalbox more".

We are sorry that you cannot see how much we did already. But be sure that things will accelerate soon.

What happens now is that there are so many recalbox connected to our servers asking for updates that we cannot just "migrate to a new server". We are revisiting the whole way to update the system, using DNS round robin, canary deployment and more. Because of the 4000 recalbox asking for 150 mo makes 600 000 gb to serve instantly when we release stable, and a bit less when we release unstable

And this is what we are working on. And this is what we are going to achieve soon.

[RustyMG]

@digitalumberjack
Erm, when the server went down and the unstable release a lot of us require went with it, do you not think that if the above message was conveyed, people may have been a bit more understanding?
Granted, I'm not saying we the users demand an explanation for everything - that's just ludicrous, but when something as major as a server goes, even a brief explanation as to what was going on in the background would have helped.....

[digitaLumberjack]

I may have a lack of communication skills

I started to write a blogpost about that, but wanted to release it when the system would be operational, maybe I should release it now.

[Dustriggon]

@rockaddicted ig the servers are still down since i dont get the 4.1 unstable update?

[Substring]

@dustriggon all shall be revealed when the time has come ^^

[lhari84]

Thanks for the hint about donations, just did one to support this great project.

Just what I'm thinking about the update strategy:

Why not offering 4.1 final as clean install image first? This should bring some major advantages:

• People who are installing a fresh device for friends would be served.
• People may reinstall their device from this offline installer to get rid of possible config problems of previous unstable versions. (instead of maybe adopting them by using the auto-update-version)
• Further some people would test the 4.1 final before it's released as an automatic update. (and maybe report bugs that can be fixed before releasing the auto-update)
• Nobody would be unpatient or even get rude anymore.
• And, last but not least, pressure from auto-update-servers would be taken away (because many people would load the offline-installer, where not each download would happen at the same time)

Feel free to correct me if my idea sucks

[Substring]

@lhari84 said in Unable to update to unstable version:

Why not offering 4.1 final as clean install image first?

I think it's not fair towards people who cant open their bartop/cab, or who simply don't want to start all over again from scratch. People who were using Recalbox at 3.3.0 know what I mean ...

Anyway we're still fixing some minor issues here and there

[sag508]

@substring I think what most people are suggesting here, including myself, is to release 4.1 via torrent in addition to the eventual update via the server. It would substantially reduce the demand by knocking out the die hards who cannot wait and those who complain at every waking moment. Hopefully, the only people are left are people who have recalbox installed but are casual users, probably don't know this forum exists and play maybe a few hours a week at worst. These people would by the nature of their usage would spread themselves over time as they boot up and get greeted with the "new update is available" message.

Also, maybe have it as a gentleman's agreement here that guys who cannot utilize anything other than the server wait a few hours or days before doing the update, in hopes to reduce the demand?

I too wouldn't mind doing a complete reinstall via a Torrent download. In fact, I'd prefer it. I don't play this thing every single waking moment of my life, I've been waiting months for 4.1, what's another day or so, if it was doing something good for the project?

I don't know how to code, I can't translate and I don't have a single artistic bone in my body to theme. But if me downloading 4.1 via torrent to save bandwidth on the server or waiting a few days to update, consider it a contribution on my behalf, no matter how small it is. Maybe other guys here can share that same view?

Thanks for all you and the team do. Seriously.

[rockaddicted]

ONCE READY, 4.1 will be available:

• direct download, img + noobs install, on gitlab (github?), and our servers.
• update OTA from ours servers.

So everyone will be able to use his preferred way to have a 4.1, clean install or update.
We don't need to setup a torrent tracker to provide a clean image, our servers will be ready to.

But, anyways, the 4.1 STABLE is not ready yet, so we won't give any link for the moment.
Please be patient and stop to ask it for everyday....
No blogpost, no forum post = no 4.1 release available