ownCloud Client 1.6.1

End of last week, we have released version 1.6.1 of the ownCloud Client, the desktop tool that does file syncing with your ownCloud. Read on the Desktop Client page how to get and install it.

The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant handling of the local sync journal. That required a lot of code changes. Unfortunately that also brought in some bugs which are now fixed with the 1.6.1 release.

On the windows platforms, we experienced a memory leak that over time let the memory consumption of the client grow. Also, a problem in the Qt5 library that we ship for windows caused the problem that under some circumstances the wrong encryption lib was loaded, so that some people saw SSL problems on Windows.

And there were crashes. Users kept on reporting that the client was crashing after some time on windows, without a special reason. None of the developers was able to reproduce that or ever saw that. We asked for backtraces, which also can be produced on windows. Even though the backtraces looked similar, we did not find an obvious reason for the crashes. Finally, by reading through all involved code levels again and again, Olivier was able to spot some code in libneon that, again under special circumstances, could cause crashes on win.

It was a one line fix, we quickly built test packages, people tested, and finally the crashes were gone (the patch to libneon is on its way to upstream of course).

All that is now fixed in 1.6.1.

What does that show?
There not very much little “easy” bug findings any more. That is similar to the soccer world championship, where the coaches keep telling that there are no “easy opponents” any more nowadays, which is also true. These tricky problems we face in the client are hard to find, require time, often special setups if they are reproduceable at all, and advanced debugging skills. Very challenging, very much fun. But that also requires very much patience from the people who suffer from that bugs. We keep on asking questions,
ask to test new daily builds and need time to investigate stuff, and more time to release once we have the fix.

Thank you all for helping in this situation, not giving up, for again testing another daily build, reporting back, trying again. That is really big.