Diaspora* software release

Great work by @steffenvanbergerem to clear the last two blockers. Thanks!

Yeah, we should now be able to release soon.
I listed the most important change in the pad and started to write some articles on my blog about the release. Goob already translated the privacy one, I think it would be nice to publish it on the foundation blog once itā€™s formal enough. @jhass @steffenvanbergerem @dennisschubert mind to review it to be sure I donā€™t say bullshit from a technical point of view?

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/milestones/0.5.0.0

Bummer, we couldnā€™t find anything

w00t \o/

Great work everyone!!!

Now Iā€™m really excited :))

I realised last night that weā€™re coming up to 5 years since the Kickstarter campaign, and thought it would be nice to tie in the release to that if possible.

Iā€™ve just checked and the Kickstarter campaign was opened on 24 April 2010, five years ago today. It ended on 2 June, which is perhaps later than we want to wait to release 0.5. But if we can tie it in somehow, it would be good, I think, for publicity.

It would be great to get a blog post out today, but I donā€™t really feel I have energy to do this at the moment. Anyone else? @flaburgan, @jasonrobinson?

Well to be honest I really donā€™t know how to present the diaspora Inc period of the project. @deadsuperhero was working on an history blogpost during a time. Iā€™m not sure what we should say, the result of the beginning of the project is clearly mitigated and I donā€™t think Iā€™m the one who should look back and draw an overview of what happened.

I donā€™t think we have to present a potted history (although that would be interesting too). I think a simply ā€˜It all started 5 years ago, and this is where we are now, with 0.5 coming outā€™ - as much as anything, to jog the memories of journalists and bloggers who got excited about the project 5 years ago and have since forgotten about it.

Iā€™ll see if I can do something later, but Iā€™m not feeling great today.

Hereā€™s a very rough first draft:

It all started 5 years ago today

Yes, it was on April 24 2010 that four kids from New York University, Maxwell Salzberg, Dan Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirsky and Raphael Sofaer, launched a campaign on the then young Kickstarter platform, asking for $10,000 to fund them for a summer project to create a decentralized social network. The campaign went viral, and 40 days later more than $200,000 had been pledged, and diaspora* was born.

Since then itā€™s been a long road with a lot of hurdles, technical and otherwise, in realising this initial vision, but the project has remained vibrant and growing throughout that time, and the community is still working to achieve a decentralized network which gives users flexibility while guarding their privacy.

The project, now owned by its community members, is about to make another major release, version 0.5.0.0, including big features such as chat among many bug fixes and performance improvements. Keep your eyes open for this release, which will be announced very soon.

Iā€™m not very happy with it, but if anyone wants to use it as a basis to write something worth posting, that would be great.

Not sure about ā€œKidsā€ :stuck_out_tongue: Students I guess? And the chat is not really ready, we present it as alpha, I donā€™t think we should promote it that much here. Apart from that, nice paper :slight_smile:

Ok, so what happens now in terms of making 0.5.0.0-FINAL a reality?

@Rich for the code, to test again the migration in a mysql database now that the encoding change is done differently. This could also be tested on a postgreSQL db.

We also need to prepare the announcement, and to create a better ā€œHow to upgradeā€ page. The RC showed us that the instruction was too confusing.

This could also be tested on a postgreSQL db.

Ehm. Nope. The migration only runs on MySQL.

test again the migration in a mysql database

Is someone doing this? If not, I can do this later in the week if it will help.

@rich1 it would be nice. I should be able to do the upgrade guide on friday.

I threw a first version up at https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Updating

Feel free to edit it in case I missed anything.

Awesome Jonne, thanks. I just reinstalled my laptop with Ubuntu 15.04 released this week-end, so I will first install diaspora 0.4 on it, and then do the upgrade, so Iā€™ll be sure everything is done :slight_smile:

Iā€™ll test MySQL tomorrow, along with the new docs from @jhass - great stuff :slight_smile:

Ok, Iā€™ve run this migration again on MySQL today and I donā€™t know whatā€™s changed but the migration time went down from 1351s to just 271s for a 1.6GB database!

Thatā€™s 22mins down to just 4mins :o

Awesome! Did you try to use the DB after the migration? Everything is fine?

I forgot the custom splash page gets trashed :frowning: Maybe include a mention of this in the updated guide from @jhass ?

Otherwise, no issues to report, migration from 0.4.1.3 to 0.5.0.0-RC went fine!

@rich1 uhm, the custom splash page is the first note after the steps.