[HEADS-UP] Minetest incompatibility changes in the future

[nrz]

Hello to our users,
0.4.12 is now out and we are working on a 0.5.0 minetest, which mean some breaks will happen into the minetest core.
The first objective of this 0.5.0 is to solve network protocol issues and rework the network layer of minetest to improve its performance and its flexiblity.
This change will happen on master branch at some point of the development, then be careful if you are using master branch.

With minetest 0.4.12 we have added a function to know network compatible servers from serverlist view. Then all your 0.4.12 client can see that all the 0.4.12 and older servers are compatible, but if 0.5.0 servers will be present, they are grayed in the serverlist and you get an error message.

If you are a minetest 0.4.11 or older admin, please upgrade your server to 0.4.12 to provide your protocol versions to master server. Also, if you follow github master branch for your server updates, please change and use the stable-0.4 branch, which let your server use the old protocol. You can do this change easily:

Code: Select all

git pull origin
git checkout stable-0.4
make -j$(grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo)

If you are a minetest 0.4.11 or older client, please upgrade your client to 0.4.12 to view the compatible servers in serverlist.
If you provide forks on different platforms, please provide the latest 0.4.12 release to your clients.

Thanks

[philipbenr]

Thanks for the heads up. Looks like I'll have to get git up and running again...

[ExeterDad]

Thank you for all the useful info's. I knew by following github this was coming, but was unclear what were the cut offs and how to get the different versions. I've been running our machines from master. I'll get them on stable for the time being.

[celeron55]

On IRC today: http://irc.minetest.ru/minetest-dev/201 ... #i_4164740

TL;DR: We will have the incompatible changes in a separate branch initially. You won't need to worry about them initially, but you do have to worry about them later.

[Marshall_maz]

I use the daily-builds ppa on ubuntu. I keep my server and client machine always on the same version ( both use daily-ppa). Is on LAN only. Will the case such as mine also be affected that client can't connect to server ?

[Wuzzy]

So, what exactly is expected to break?
The Lua API (which components)? Existing worlds? Etc.

[Casimir]

Judging from the current roadmap it seems the network part will be incompatible, and maybe formspecs.
And I think there is a very strong rule not to break existing worlds.

[nrz]

Network layer, protocol will evolve and we couldn't maintain old versions because we need to rework on some engine functions. Colored chat can cause problems too

If you are local only you are not affected by this change

[TenPlus1]

So far all I can see is the 0.4.11 stable builds for linux and 0.4.12 for windows only... I will not run 0.4.12 dev on a server...