Development / Community / Business version

[Maurice]

Hey everyone,

Inspired by the recent hostwatch experience, I wanted to start a bit of a meta discussion about the Development / Community / Business versions of OPNsense and when to use which. It was my understanding that Development is for public testing, Community is ready for production (although a bit bleeding edge) and Business is extra stable for critical use cases.

From what I see on GitHub and the forum and from my own experience, hostwatch is still in the development phase. For example, a serious issue was reported a month ago and is still open. Nonetheless, it was now moved to the Community version and enabled by default. This feels like a beta test, which I was under the impression you needed to opt-in for by switching to the Development version.

Not blaming anyone, just interested in your opinions about what level of maturity you (can) expect in which version.

Development = beta, Community = stable, Business = extra stable?
Or Development = alpha, Community = beta, Business = stable?

Personally, I mostly use the Community version and occasionally switch to Development when I really need a feature which has not yet been released.

Cheers
Maurice

[OPNenthu]

Development = beta, Community = stable, Business = extra stable?

I think this.

Right now there's a tension for Community edition because many of us rely on it to not break between updates, but the project relies on it to mature and flesh out new features.

On occasion I'll deliberately take a major update on Day 1 in order to try out some interesting new thing (and contribute feedback), and I'll take a snapshot before doing so, but usually I'll wait for some point release or for forum complaints to die down.  I don't think most people are monitoring the threads though and are probably expecting that updates are safe.

How can we help to resolve this tension?  I think the idea of a Basic Edition license got shot down multiple times, and I think for good reason (I don't want dichotomies either).

[passeri]

Given the base is working software, not a development from scratch, I can understand that the release pattern does not follow a conventional cycle such as one might read in Wikipedia. I interpret development as a form of beta which is yet changing for reasons other than bugs. Community I accept as an advanced stable release which may yet have bugs which are fixed under _NN releases. Business is a supported stable release which might be called long term except that its term is not long.

Opnsense is not the only operation to follow a pattern like this, nor the only forum in which it is argued. I think that the conventional namings from alpha through gold, including the word beta, confuse the issue by their prior connotations.

We have a stable base product. On that there is a development offshoot. When that is feature-complete (for this phase) and stable it becomes Community, field testing more advanced features ahead of the low-risk business edition.

The clear implication is that there are three levels of risk for the consumers who must themselves share the risk management as discussed, firstly by selecting in which level they will join and secondly by their own testing and timing of upgrades on one or more of their own systems. Personally I use select Community then upgrade (always with snapshots) through "Does it work for a few hours?" on a reserve box to "Does it work for a few days?" on an internal production box to "Here we go" on the edge router.