Today marks a milestone of sorts. It’s the first day of the new year and, as it also happens to be the first Tuesday of the month, it’s a Syncthing release day. Today is also almost Syncthing’s birthday; the first public release was “0.2” on December 30, 2013, five years and two days ago.
Given all of this I thought this would be a good day to let Syncthing graduate and become a 1.0 kind of thing.
Much like a black belt in martial art doesn’t indicate that you’ve learned all there is to know, a 1.0 version doesn’t mean Syncthing is done. There is a lot left to do and learn. At the same time we need to be aware that Syncthing is used “in production”. Syncthing gets roughly a million downloads of each stable release, just from Github, and syncs probably hundreds of terabytes of changes each day. Our users are entrusting precious data to Syncthing. We need to treat that trust with respect.
As much as a version number means anything at all, a “major zero” version number means that you can expect breakage. This is not what we want to communicate. Especially, it’s not the mindset that we should have towards our users. Hence Syncthing is now graduating from being in perpetual beta to being actual release software, yet the journey of development continues.
Seeing as this is a new major release Syncthing will also be granted a new code name. The Dysprosium Dragonfly took flight with 0.14.0 in July 2016. Now it morphs into the alphabetically adjacent Erbium Earthworm.
Anyway. Enjoy your regularly scheduled Syncthing release, thank you all for these five years, and we look forward to five more years of continued relevance and increasing stability.
For those who might wonder how this release relates to the 0.14.55-rc.2 release candidate, the answer is that it’s identical apart from the code name and version number.
Happy graduation day syncthing and thank you so much to all contributors and programmers!
Jakob, how about a small look into the future for syncthing?
I’d love to see that syncfolders would have a seperate index database. And a database reset button <3. I really love to use syncthing as a anti-bit-rot check system (i already do^^).
Maybe there could be a AWS syncthing instance with encrypted hash and data saving done by syncthing.
Or some kind of managing tool which could be sold seperately and you can add all your syncthing devices to. One master syncthing running which shows the extended managing website where all devices are shown and are manageable.
There could be a performance testing special folder which collects data about the whole device like hashing performance, network p., storage p. and runs through some tests to determine the max performance or reasonable performance with max. 50% used system resources.
I’d been wondering when this would happen, particularly since the introduction of receive-only folders. The difference in functionality between 0.14.0 and 0.14.54 is enormous despite compatibility, so it’s nice to see this acknowledged in some more obvious way.
Will Syncthing still have three-part version numbers?
Yes it will. For now the release schedule will be the same, just that there is an option to go to 1.0.1 or 1.1.0. There is already a general idea, but the specifics of how that will be handled are still under consideration. For now there’s more or less no change to how it happened before. Anything else will be announced.
I haven’t been very active recently but I’m still lurking around and it’s been great to watch the project grow and flourish!
On a side note I like how Syncthing has become kind of a set it and forget it. I got it syncing things between a couple of servers I got and I have barely touched them for years.
