Would it be an idea to let us user have a “stable” vs “latest” update option in virtualmin/webmin?
I run on Debian as I like my servers to be stable and boring. Sometimes a webmin update breaks stuff as happens in software development and which you guys fix quickly. I recently ran into the letsencrypt and usermin problems myself.
The idea is that after a new webmin release has been in de wild and trouble free for two weeks or so it would be marked as stable. Overseen bugs get caught in the latest branch and after that everyone gets the stable one?
I would run my personal server on latest and production on stable.
We simply don’t have the resources to maintain two branches of everything. We do this mostly for free. Virtualmin Pro brings in enough revenue for about one decent developer salary (not a Silicon Valley developer salary, just a regular one somewhere with normal developer wages), and there are four of us.
All of the recent updates have been in response to security bugs we’ve found in our own audits (performed on our own time at our own expense, LLMs aren’t free), and the minor quirks that have resulted from those fixes would have necessarily also happened in the “stable” branch, if we had such a thing, because they were security updates. It would be malpractice for us to roll a security update to any channel without also rolling it to all channels.
We’re sorry there has been so much churn lately. We didn’t invent the LLMs or make them alarmingly good at finding security bugs. And, we didn’t make the world in which there are far more bad actors than good looking for security bugs in software, necessitating we drop everything and perform a massive audit of all of our software in a race against those bad actors.
As a fellow (in my case solo) developer: Very well understood. My small yearly donation won’t pay much. Secretly I am hoping that someone like Hetzner or so would help you out with proper financing.
I think I found virtualmin when switching to Hetzner around 2010 or so. I vaguely remember it was an option for dedicated servers back then. And how entirely I loved it after several mixed experiences with commercial control panels.
It works well to watch the forum after a new release and any problems will be pointed out quickly. When they stop it’s stable. And it doesn’t take long. Thank everyone involved for a fantastic software.
The support that I receive from Virtualmin is excellent. In the recent version of Webmin, I found a bug and it was fixed in less than 1 day. I am not sure you can hope for any better support than that. You guys are fantastic. Keep up the good work.
