Syncthing Stable & Candidate Releases
A while back we used to release once a week. Since this summer releases are made every second Tuesday. We will now introduce the concept of “stable releases” and “release candidates”.
A new release candidate will be released every two weeks, based on the current state of development. That’s pretty much what we’ve always been doing. The difference is that it will then be in testing for about two weeks before being promoted to stable release status.
You can read more about the details in the documentation article, but I’ll include the table summarizing the differences here:
StableCandidateStabilityMore stableMore experimentalFeatures & FixesAbout two weeks behindLatestAuto UpgradesOptionalMandatoryAnon. Usage ReportingOptionalMandatorySupportFully supportedFully supported
You’ll note that usage reporting and automatic upgrades (depending on how you installed) are always enabled on candidate builds. You may have strong opinions on this and do not want to enable usage reporting. That’s perfectly fine and the stable release is for you.
The ability to chose between stable and candidate will be in v0.14.22, released later this week. If you have automatic upgrades enabled, you will be greeted with a notification similar to this:
The automatic upgrades prompt.
Syncthing will also make an initial choice for you:
Do you have automatic upgrades and usage reporting on today? Syncthing will default to the candidate channel. Your next upgrade will be v0.14.23-rc.1 in about two weeks.
If you have either of those turned off, Syncthing will default to the stable channel. Your next upgrade will be v0.14.23 in about a month - two weeks after the v0.14.23-rc.1 candidate.
If Syncthing didn’t make the right choice for you, you can change it whenever.
If you install from our APT repository, you can manually add the new candidate channel, nothing will happen automatically. If you install from some other source, they will hopefully give you the stable release and nothing else.
I hope this will give more stability to the users who prefer that, and keep the pace quick for the users who prefer that.