Sorry about your issues.
OH2 introduced a couple of fundamental changes such as to build on top of Karaf and Eclipse Smarthome with its thing concept. The price to pay for now is instability. The interim phase is frustrating and can turn out to be very long.
We need ESH and Karaf to stabilize in a literal sense (no more crashes) and as an API (no more breaking changes).
And there’s still bugs to be found in there, particularly those to show up on startup (bad caching, circular dependencies and 100% CPU usage in some hard-to-determine cases).
But as another veteran IT pro, I’ve encountered a scheme like this on a number of occasions in software from reputated vendors that you do pay a lot for in SW and support (and of course you cannot expect any Open Source project to provide the same level of professional maintenance to ensure backwards compatibility, particularly in this fast moving space). And I’m still convinced that these strategic decisions do make sense in the long run.
Don’t get me wrong. As an end user, I too, had a very hard time moving my working 1.8 based house to OH2.
Had to figure out how to distribute the config and fully understand the dependencies. Needed to rewrite all of my (numerous) rules. Spent a whole year migrating my house forth and back from OH1 to OH2 multiple times just to encounter another severe issue that I couldn’t resolve quickly (a device or rule to not work any more). Kept running around the house to ex- and reinclude many of my devices. My wife refused to talk to me at times. Found myself stuck in the situation where OH2 did run, but I had to shutdown it every time I needed to reconfigure my (zwave) devices because the 2.X based UI (habmin) didn’t work with the 1.x binding.
Then again, let’s stay fair: it just happens to people to migrate from OH1 to OH2. And it’s (almost) always the binding(s) to cause trouble, not OH2 as a whole. It does not apply to people to start with OH2. It does not apply when you use the 2.X bindings. It just happens because of issues with specific tech you’re using in your setup.
Cold comfort, I know, but thing is, you need to get engaged: you need to methodically analyse and track the issues you encounter, and post or open Github issues for them.
@kai, @chris and other core developers are working truely hard and in a very responsive manner to fix issues and even to resolve and explain real-world setup problems, but if you don’t tell them, they have no chance to help.
And the reason for this post of mine is good news: the end is near ! The end of frustrating days, that is
Starting this morning, I finally do have my all-OH2 house setup working.
Admitted, it’s bleeding edge (snapshot #1030 and the development version of the zwave binding), but
IT’S WORKING.
Don’t give up!