Changes at Linuxserver.io....


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linuxserver_medium.png

 

Over the past couple of months, there have been a few things going on in the Linuxserver.io world which has led to a slower pace of development and a little less community interaction, and for that we can only apologise. Now we are starting to get back in full swing, we thought we should share what we’ve got planned in the next few weeks & months.

 

REPOSITORIES

 

First of all, there will be some restructuring with our fleet of dockers. Some of our dockers are becoming increasingly difficult to support, so we have decided to re-organise the repo’s.

 

linuxserver

 

Our current main docker repository which will have the fleet of dockers that the team actively supports.

 

linuxserver-community

 

This will be a new, innovative repo, that is for any docker requests from community members that we produce and are not used by any of the linuxserver.io team and will therefore be directly supported by community members themselves.

 

All of the linuxserver.io members are volunteers and do this in our spare time, which is finite. The idea behind this is that if you request a docker and we produce it, then YOU become responsible for helping support it, as you are better placed to do so as an active user. You will become the community liason and named as such. We’d like to see you help other members with any problems and liase with us about any problems you can’t fix or need help with via the forum, github or IRC and work with us to keep this maintained. No coding ability is required, just a willingness to “muck in” and monitor the support thread for the container. If you don’t do so, and “request and run” AND nobody else offers to take over, then eventually we’ll pull the container as it’s not fair to other users if we can’t offer support.

 

lsioarmhf

 

Our second new repo, this time it will be for all you users that want to run our dockers on any armhf platform capable of running the docker service, such as your raspberry pi’s / Odroid boxes. These dockers will be duplicates of the images we create for x86 and will also be both linuxserver and linuxserver-community varieties,

 

lsiodev

 

Our development repo and not for production use. Note, up to now, some of our “non-standard” containers have been in this repo but these will be merged into our main repo going forward and this repo will purely be for development and pre-release testing, therefore unsupported and not recommended for end users.

 

lsiobase

 

Our repo to house all our base images.

 

Over the next couple of weeks, you will therefore find that some Docker containers will be moved to different repo’s or possibly even removed, we don’t yet have a final list of what is being moved/removed yet but if you have any concerns, feel free to get in touch on Github or IRC.

 

BASEIMAGE UPDATES

 

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be switching our containers to a shiny new base image – Alpine.

 

Anything that doesn’t run on Alpine will be rebased to Xenial as we have decided to drop Phusion due to lack of updates and Alpine offers significant advantages in terms of reducing container sizes. We don’t anticipate any major migration issues with the transition from Phusion to Alpine but please please please backup your appdata first before you update our containers.

 

AUTO-UPDATING

 

After much discussion, we have decided that we are going to change our containers regarding the autoupdate feature. Autoupdates have probably been the biggest generator of support issues with our images and as such , in conjunction with the baseimage updates, we are moving towards having the majority of our images not autoupdate, a notable exception being plex media server. Aside from configuration mismatches from version to version and stability issues, the update routines are processor intensive and make containers slow to start. To mitigate this we plan to update the applications more frequently in the future with more regular image refreshes.

 

WEBSITE/FORUM

 

We are planning on doing some maintenance work in regards to the website and forum, a bit of a clean up and try to get some fresh content back into the site.

 

PODCAST

Currently the podcast has been put on hold, we have had amazing feedback for this and plan to start this up again soon!

 

COMMUNITY

 

As always we’re a team of volunteers, we rely both on donations and contributions from our own pockets to keep this project going. So as always if you think you can help in any way then please get in touch. Either by helping with support, development, articles for the website or donations.

 

LinuxServer.io Team.

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Good luck guys, I hope the transition to alpine is smooth, I will be watching with interest :-)

 

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Thanks binhex, nice of you to say so.  Mind you if it all goes tits up, you're going to be extra busy as well with new users! lol

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

 

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I have to say, I started using linuxserver's dockers because of the auto updates.  I don't want to fart about having to update manually.  A little disappointing.

 

Yeah, we thought long and hard about it, and sorry you feel that way, but it's become a nightmare to support.  Our other option was to just drop any containers that we ourselves aren't using, Occasionally the auto-update breaks stuff and then trying to figure out which version people are on and what actually broke it is impossible, especially if the user isn't technically minded.  Then we get grief because it's broken.

 

Personally, I've never really understood if something is working fine, the need to be on the absolute latest.  Quite often we get asked "This new version is out, when is it going to get updated" (Often people are referring to a github site and our app pulls from a PPA we have no control over, people moan about that.) 

 

I rely with "What fix or feature do you need in this new version?" and no reply.

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I am not surprised by the changes in regards to the auto-update feature especially when you offer support for apps you do not develop directly. I always maintained that the only sane and reasonable approach is to remove auto-update capabilities and instead version the dockers with explocit versions. The only way I would include autoupdate functionality on applications I am not the lead developer of is by way of completely unsupported dockers, and then include a huge caveat of "if it breaks, you've been warned ahead of time!"

 

I hope your users can understand the technical reasons why this change is inevitable.

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I have to say, I started using linuxserver's dockers because of the auto updates.  I don't want to fart about having to update manually.  A little disappointing.

You don't have to update the app manually. You would merely wait until the docker container has been fully tested and verified to work, and then you would update to the newer version of the docker container. On unraid this would be done by a simple clock of the Update Container in the docker manager.

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I am not surprised by the changes in regards to the auto-update feature especially when you offer support for apps you do not develop directly.

+1  For myself, I got a little bit turned off on updates happening on perfectly functioning docker apps that actually caused way more harm than good.  Who's ever had their CP database get trashed by an update?

 

On the other hand, (truth be told), I am a big hypocrite on auto-updating since it's probably fair to say that I'm the biggest proponent of auto-updating plugins.  But then again I am the developer (or talk with the other developers) and those updates tend to solve more problems than they cause.  (Pet-peeve:  Looking at someone's diagnostics and seeing them running CA from 3 months ago, or having to continually tell someone to update their webUI because they get orphaned images when using volume paths with spaces in it)

 

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Another thing, that may help people to understand our reasoning, is the sheer amount of time we have to put into this.  I know that the two "support" guys (myself and j0nnymoe) both work full time and have quite a lot of balls to juggle so to speak.  We spend a hell of a lot of our free time keeping stuff going, and then the back end of the guys (mainly sparklyballs at the moment, smdion & ironicbadger being occupied with real life type stuff at the moment) that do the development/maintenance and less of the support.  It just wouldn't be sustainable in the long term unless we changed something. 

 

Like we've said, you want to get involved, then please let us know, luckily danioj has joined the ranks which should help, but the more the merrier.

 

And we've surpassed over 3.8 million pulls now of our containers. (Granted that's not necessarily all unique users, but just to give a figure for some idea of scale)

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I fully support your move to get rid of auto-update.

It's better to break the containers yourself  ;D

Or to delete them entirely...  Someone's really good at that I heard...

 

Man.... one little mistake that could have happened to anyone....

Could've happened to anyone.  But it happened to you which makes even funnier

 

Sent from my LG-D852 using Tapatalk

 

 

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I fully support your move to get rid of auto-update.

It's better to break the containers yourself  ;D

Or to delete them entirely...  Someone's really good at that I heard...

 

Man.... one little mistake that could have happened to anyone....

 

i told you already, sometime in 2050, we'll probably forget it, if we're still around by then.

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I fully support your move to get rid of auto-update.

It's better to break the containers yourself  ;D

Or to delete them entirely...  Someone's really good at that I heard...

 

Man.... one little mistake that could have happened to anyone....

 

i told you already, sometime in 2050, we'll probably forget it, if we're still around by then.

 

I'm so glad I only linked to the wrong Repo, and not delete a repo which everyone uses.

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