What’s New in 3.2?

What’s New in 3.2?

by Natassia Stelmaszek -
Number of replies: 15

I’ve been looking for information about changes that will appear with the release of Moodle 3.2 in a few days.  So far everything that I’ve found has been oriented toward developers.  Is there any place where the changes are described from the point of view of system administrators/managers?

I work for a large university and prefer that any updates that alter the end user’s experience to be installed during the break period between terms.  It would be nice to know what to expect, particularly when there are changes in pre-requisites.  One snippet of information that I ran across said that Moodle 3.2 will require the use of PHP 5.6. 

Our organization has a policy that Linux servers will use CentOS as the operating system.  Part of CentOS’s appeal is the commitment to long-term stability and support.  This conservative approach leads to a slower adoption of changes originating outside of the RHEL/CentOS realm but strongly supports the “if it works don’t break it” philosophy.  As a consequence the latest release of PHP from the CentOS repositories is 5.4.16 which leaves me in an awkward situation.

The prevailing wisdom it to keep your software up to date and I try to be diligent about updating my servers’ OS as well as the Moodle code.  Moodle’s aggressive release schedule means that there will be several major (3.0 to 3.1 to 3.2, etc.) upgrades during the school year.  I like the fact that there is an active community of developers working to improve Moodle.  I would just like to know in advance when an update is going to force me to make changes outside of the path/to/moodle directory.

Natassia

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Albert Ramsbottom -

You can check what changes are in each release but sometimes the techno babble doesn't really tell you what might happen

I am with you on this one and try to adopt "if it aint broken don't fix it" attitude. And I certainly wont upgrade if the release is just cosmetic.

We only ever upgrade in the summer and actually always remain 2 updates behind the current latest


Albert




Average of ratings: -
In reply to Albert Ramsbottom

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Derek Chirnside -

Al, 'Just cosmetic'?

There have been no releases since 2.0 that have been just cosmetic - as far as we are concerned.  There has always been some worthwhile improvements.

-Derek

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Everybody + dog uses the webtatic repositories for newer versions of PHP on CentOS and can, I think, be safely considered to be in the stable bracket.

While I take your point about PHP 5.4 being stable, the other side of the coin is that it is also life-expired and unsupported thus, almost certainly, containing security issues. You are also missing out on the performance advantages of newer versions.

I don't know if you've seen the draft release notes for 3.2 - https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_3.2_release_notes.  However, I do have a lot of sympathy for what you say. It would be nice to know well in advance when such decisions are made without having to wade through lots of developer discussions. 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Howard Miller

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Derek Chirnside -

Mary, Helen (etc)  See Below.

This is probably the latest ever in the release cycle I have seen this message in the "New features" that stuff is 'coming soon".  How about getting a little bit of stuff up there?  I know I could do it, but it would take me a lot of time to pull it together from the tracker etc.  It's probably in your head.  Or if there is a better link to mew things, then let us know.

To the Natassia: MoodleNews will probably be the best source of information pulled from almost everywhere.  See http://www.moodlenews.com/?s=moodle+3.2

Regarding 'aggressive' releases. I'm not sure I agree with you: there are only 2 releases a year (they come every 6 months) and part of this benefit is that both northern and southern hemisphere terms can work around a nice secure recent annual upgrade.  12 month cycles would mean one hemisphere misses out.

I'd suggest you ask what other Moodle users on CentOS do.  I can see your problem.  

As to knowing in advance when you need to upgrade outside the Moodle folders, good point.  I'm sure it is there somewhere.  

-Derek


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Howard Miller

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Olumuyiwa Taiwo -
Picture of Plugin developers

The use of Webtatic repositories on Centos is strongly discouraged - https://wiki.centos.org/de/AdditionalResources/Repositories/

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Olumuyiwa Taiwo

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

I see (on that page) only one 3rd party repo for which there is a note ... of note ... Atomic.

There is also mention of enable/disable ... which is what I do ... must enable the use of a repo to check on updates/upgrades to packages one has installed from that repo.

There is also is a yum priority extension one could install which would enable the ability to make sure updates/upgrades from official repos are first and then in order of the priority setup in each of the 3rd party repos.

Plus, if a package was originally installed via a repo, the system should check only that 3rd party repo for that package if one gets 'lazy' (shame on them!) on enable/disable.

All the above to say ... think one can use Webtatic ... but, epel, remi, ok.

Besides that, one could seek out the official repos for PHP and MySQL as well.

As with many things .... pick your 'poison' ... learn your 'antidote' ... me thinks.

2 cent opinion, of course.

'spirit of sharing', Ken



Average of ratings: -
In reply to Howard Miller

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Damyon Wiese -

I just want to say that if you are switching php versions anyway, you really want to be on php 7. It's really noticeably faster.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Let me see if I understand you.  You like to keep software up to date but don't like to update if it isn't broken.  You want both conditions to be met at the same time.  Right?

If you want to know what upgrading would be like, why not install your current moodle on an experimental server and then upgrade it?

(Just trying to help you think this through.)

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Natassia Stelmaszek -

Hello everyone, I’m sorry that it took me so long to respond but I was on vacation last week over the American Thanksgiving holiday.  Thank you to all of you that took the time to reply to my post.  The moodlenews.com site looks like it could be a great source of information. 

I realize that part of my original post, about updates vs. stability sounded contradictory.  I took over our site less than a year ago.  The hardware, operating system and Moodle had been (IMHO) a bit neglected.  Running “yum check-update” left me with an eight-page report.  I never want to fall that far behind again. 

At the same time, one of the desirable features of CentOS is its stability as an “enterprise” operating system and that careful testing is performed to make certain that changes do not break the existing systems.  If you develop software that runs on a given version, you can be confident that it will continue to operate as long as you stay on that major version and that major versions will continue to be supported for a relatively long time. 

In other words I would like to stay current but also remain cautious.  All updates are tested on our Beta system before being implemented on the Production system.  This has revealed issues related to plugins that we use, so that disruptions in service to our customers (faculty and students) are avoided.

The release of CentOS updates is directly tied to RHEL releases.  Someone in that organization decided that newer versions of PHP will not be supported in version 7 of the OS.  (A fact that has been a repeated subject on CentOS community forums.)  This means that the earliest that I could make the move from Moodle 3.1 to 3.2 would be some time after the release of CentOS version 8. 

Perhaps I am being too cautious but I have been warned many time about problems encountered when “unofficial” repo sites are used.  I looked into compiling from the PHP source code but I’m intimidated by the choice of configuration options that are available.

Advice?

 

Natassia


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

@Natassia

Maybe someone should ask ... what version of CentOS is your server running?   I ask because of the comment about the number of updates available the first time you ran a yum update.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ken Task

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Natassia Stelmaszek -

That event took place almost a year ago on hardware running an older version of RHEL.  My current systems are CentOS 7 with current updates installed.

BTW after I had the new systems up and running I did the update on the system running the old OS.  Yum processed all 8+ pages of updates without any trouble so two thumbs-up to RH.

Natassia

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Relative to updating Moodle, I am one who likes to update my moodle about once every month or so.  I have found that updates at the third dot level (3.1.1 to 3.1.2, for example) are pretty safe.  Then, the first dot updates (3.0 to 3.1, for example), I am a little more cautious. And with major updates (2.0 to 3.0) I am very cautious.

Yes, I too run an experimental environment (MAMP and others) where I test every upgrade before installing.  I also do complete nightly backups of my production moodle.

I really can't comment much about server updates.  I have a paid-for VPS with cPanel for my small moodle system (approx. 200-300 students), and I have turned on auto updates.  This seems to work fine.  I am not a very good "server" person, but Ken, Howard, Usman, and others are really knowledgeable and helpful.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Natassia Stelmaszek

Re: What’s New in 3.2?

by Matteo Scaramuccia -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Natassia,
be more confident with SCL and/or with third-party repos like Remi's wink.
For example using Remi's repo to replace the PHP binaries provided with the distro:

# Install Epel's and Remi Collet's repos for CentOS 7.
# Then install those latest PHP 7.0.x modules required by Moodle.
yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm \
  && yum -y install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm \
  && yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70 \
  && yum -y install php php-bcmath php-cli php-common php-gd \
                    php-intl php-json php-mbstring php-mysqlnd php-opcache \
                    php-pdo php-pear \
                    php-pecl-apcu php-pecl-solr2 php-pecl-zip \
                    php-process php-soap php-xml php-xmlrpc
 
# Configure PHP timezone.
echo "Setting PHP default timezone to 'Europe/Rome'..." \
  && /usr/bin/sed -i "s@^;date.timezone =\$@date.timezone = 'Europe/Rome'@g" /etc/php.ini

and you'll run an up-to-date and trust-able PHP 7.0.x environment big grin.

SCL has a similar route, with the possibility to keep both PHP versions, the one shipped with the distro and the other chosen by you.

HTH,
Matteo

Average of ratings: Useful (1)