Feelings after upgrade from 2.4 to 2.5.2

1

Hi everyone,
I dont want to hurt anyone feelings (especially developers), but i will say what has to be said.
I am myself developer and coding more than decade in multiple languages.

I passed long way using OpenHab, starting on RaspberriPi then QNAP docker and finished Ubuntu Server in QNAP virtual machine.
Realy spent long time.
My last openhab using:
zwave, mqtt, NUT, Mail, Exec, SystemInfo, frontail, grafana, Telegram, Esp32(NFC reader) over mqtt,
SMS sending receiving, network scanning ptython applications over mqtt and much more crap.

When trying to setup each of them of course it did`t worked from the first even second time. After of hours in google and forums, walking over all dirt like everyone else finally somehow starts to work.
Hard to imagine simple person fighting all those problems without understanding rules, functions, scripts or even linux and so on.

After stabilization system worked multiple months without a problems.
Yesterday tried to rebuild zwave binding including my own binding to attach Z-Uno to OpenHab.
Latest zwave build failed loading with multiple unresolved references. Tried to rebuild older binding without success.
After some time give up searching and resolving those references decided to upgrade my stable 2.4 to to 2.5.2

And the same problems started again!

  1. Standard zwave stopped working restarting controller
    Attempting to add listener when controller is null
    [ve.internal.protocol.ZWaveController] - Starting ZWave controller
    [ve.internal.protocol.ZWaveController] - ZWave timeout is set to 5000ms. Soft reset is false.
    sometimes works sometimes not
  2. Scripts not executing
    Tried to execute ‘/etc/openhab2/scripts/uptime.sh’, but it is not contained in whitelist.
    Created whitelist and after fight with CRs LFs started to work until next restart
  3. Mqtt stopped working without any errors
  4. NUT stopped working
    Failed installing ‘openhab-binding-networkupstools1’
    reinstalled with no success
  5. Standard icons gone in HabPanel
  6. some other

Am I alone feeling that this project is going nowhere with all untested features that works only in developers lab and single machine?
I am familiar with HAsistant but no at this level like OpenHab.
Today I starting to think maybe appologize HAssistant and try one more time to be sure who to blame.
Tired of constant problems, information found only in forums with multiple workarounds. You know what I mean.

Seems that every OpenHab user has to be almost developer or has to have huge cohones to sit on every small problem hours on the google.
But even as developer I am tired and dont want to get the same not tested issues to my face over and over every time trying new binding or doing new thing.

I am very frustrated and angry, but tried to be polite and professional.
Not sure do I need any help on those issues.
First I want to hear other experiences and think what to do next!
I am at the crossroad!

2 Likes
2

Did you follow the instructions in the Release Notes?
Hint: There is now a v2 binding, If you want the v1 one you must enable legacy bindings.

If you have addons restarting every minute, you likely have an invalid addon configured. A common one is restdocs since it was moved from misc to ui. The addons.config file in the userdata tree should shed some light on the situation.

3

In my opinion, it is reasonable for you to feel this way in your current state of frustration. I just want to make that clear so that it doesn’t sound like I’m judging or criticizing you for speaking your mind. I’m hoping that others will follow my lead and keep this objective, while focusing on moving forward in a positive way.

Speaking as a non-developer, I haven’t had as many issues as you’ve had, perhaps because I place limitations on myself. If I perceive that something is beyond my current skill set, I walk away and continue to be happy with what I’ve got. But as a developer, I think you’re inclined to take on bigger and more complex challenges, and are more frustrated when you can’t get them to work. I feel the same way in any area where I’m confident in my skills/expertise, but can’t solve the problem.

Every time I try to do something new in OH, my expectation is that it’s going to go very wrong before I get it right. So, I guess I’m buying into the notion that there will always be difficulties, as I think that comes with the territory. And to be honest, I don’t know that it’s any better with a commercial solution such as SmartThings that intentionally limits features/abilities to avoid the problems of a complex, “you can do anything” system like OH. It’s just a different set of frustrations. I expect that the same could be said for Home Assistant: not necessarily better or worse, just different.

Coming back to the original question, I don’t think OH users have to be developers (I’m proof of that). We just have to be willing to accept the challenges it brings as an open-source, do-anything system. If you decide that you’re no longer willing/able, then it just means this isn’t a good fit at this point in time. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I hope you get it all worked out and that you regain confidence in OH. If this is a hobby for you (as it is for me), then it should be interesting and fun! I’ll be the first one out the door when that’s no longer the case.

1 Like
4

There were a number of breaking changes for a number of bindings in the little more than a year between 2.4 and 2.5.2. They all were listed in the announcements and by apt during the upgrade.

  1. Sounds a whole lot like the restapi problem. The restapi moved from misc to UIs . After the upgrade, OH can’t find it so it restarts all the bindings every minute every time it tries to find it again.

  2. Is a very new breaking change (between 2.5.1 and 2.5.2) and unfortunately it does have a bug (already fixed) where you have to touch the whitelist file after oh restarts. I find a simple system started rule with an executeCommandLine is a nice work around until 2.5.3 comes out with the fix.

  3. Where you on MQTT v1 or v2? If v2, is your broker Thing showing as online? If v1, are you sure the v1 binding is installed? When a v2 binding comes out, the old binding becomes legacy. I if you don’t enable legacy bindings it won’t install it even slow a v1 binding that is new legacy. Concerns
    Consequently, the v1 binding gets removed and either the v2 binding gets installed in it’s place or nothing gets installed (not sure which). Since the v2 version of the MQTT binding was released with 2.4 I can’t say whether this is your problem or not, but given 4i suspect it is.

  4. NUT has been replaced with a v2 binding as well and it works very well btw. But that means the v1 version is not legacy.

Can’t comment on 5 and 6. But of the first four, one is a bonafide bug and the other three are OH working as designed. One can argue whether that’s a good design or not and if you are so inclined, take it to GitHub. None of us here can do anything about it.

I also can’t comment about HA except to say a number of users move to OH because upgrade problems like these are even more severe over there. YMMV.

I do think a lot of users avoid a lot of these sorts of problems by updating more frequently. When you update once a month or even once a quarter, the number of differences is small and relatively easy to deal with. And there will be a lot of recent forum postings about it. When you want a year or more the changes are many and your work dealing with them had to be done all at once.

Finally, there are hundreds of OH add-ons with hundreds of different programmers. Any ecosystem this large is going to have uneven quality from one add-on to the next. And problems and bugs are not evenly distributed among them all.

5

Didn’t the 2.5.2 fix this UI issue with the restapi? Wasn’t that one of the main reasons for 2.5.2 coming out?

6

No. The main issue for 2.5.2 was the exec whitelist.

It appears there will be no core changes for bugs or security. Just addons are updated.

7

Sure this is a hobby. But I have many of them and I dont like that OpenHab is taking to much my life. I dont want to spend half a life maintaining OpenHab. Such stupid bugs like missing misc folder after upgrade, missing whitelist or missing standard icons can be tested before release. For god sake I upgrading from stable to stable. Yes you can say that I am to stupid to fight all those problems, but if there will be no changes in quality, at the end of the day this project will fail and some other will do its job.
As a user, like everyone else, I expected new version be more stable with new features and other. But in result you get again not working system, new unseen bugs and new “Hobby” weekend. Probably developers wanted this way that hobby would be more interesting and never ending.

1 Like
8

They were listed in the Release Announcement. They were needed to fix a serious security vulnerability. The fact you did not perform due diligence by reading announcements and Release notes before upgrading is the real bug.

9

There Your favorite release notes!

REST Docs

This add-on is now part of the UIs. When previously installed using a UI, uninstall the REST Docs before updating and reinstall it after the update to prevent errors. When installing it using textual configuration, update services/addons.cfg by removing restdocs from misc and add it to ui instead.

my 2.4 version has no misc folder at all. restdocs was even not installed.

MQTT Binding
Homie channel names may have changed if special characters are used for MQTT topic names.
Clear as day! No questions just DO IT!

This “Everything is fine” attitude I thing is in not right place.
This topic can be closed. I said my opinion. If no one asks where is a problem and why is happening. Let it be.

10

You asked for others’ experiences, so I shared mine. I tried to be supportive and encouraging of your experience and avoid this thread becoming confrontational.

I never suggested anything like that, so now you’re just putting words in my mouth.

I really do my best to be supportive and encouraging when people in this community are frustrated, and I thought that’s what you were looking for. Your desire to argue back at me makes it seem like you just want to complain and were hoping that others would complain along with you. I’m not a big fan of that mentality.

You appear to have made up your mind even before starting this conversation, so as you say, there’s no point in continuing it any further. It’s unfortunate that openHAB wasn’t a better experience for you, and I hope you find something that suits your needs.

3 Likes
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Nowhere does it state that misc is a folder.

12

No I kind of agree, it would be nice if it was a little more tested and the upgrade process was tested to catch stuff like these issues. We are all trying our best because we believe in this project and hope it can be better. People pointing out it’s faults are how things get fixed so thank you for your contribution and hope you decide to stick around

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