Coming Soon: Sympl 13 for Debian Trixie

News & Updates
1

For the last few months, I’ve been working on the next version of Sympl for the recently released Debian Trixie, but it’s not quite production ready yet.

Unfortunately its taking a bit longer than previous releases due to a significant part of the configuration and authentication systems which needed to be rebuilt. The good news however is that this provides a more stable and better tested platform for future upgrades of Sympl.

So far, there are a few small changes:

  • New behind-the-scenes configuration system for mailboxes, which will allow support for more complicated systems in the future, like including a new file system ‘watcher’ processes which monitor the filesystem for changes and automatically reconfigure the system as needed.
  • The Dovecot mail configuration has been rebuilt from the ground up, with optional additional configuration support, and cleaner SNI configuration.
  • Web logs are now saved to both /srv/example.com/public/logs and /var/log/apache2 to make is easier to check recent logs when identifying issues.
  • Support has been dropped for the undocumented sieve filters on local user mailboxes (not the normally configured domain mailboxes). These mailboxes (with their files in /home/username/Maildir) were an undocumented feature from Symbiosis, and unsurprisingly don’t seem to be used much, with sieve filters for them are likely used even less. Normal mailboxes in /srv/example.com/mailboxes are uneffected.

No changes have been made to the normal configuration systems, and everything else remains the same, so porting a domain from an existing Sympl 11 or 12 system should be fine.

There are a few small bugs to deal with yet before I’d be happy considering this stable, and I’ll put up another news post when it’s complete. I expect this should be in the next couple of weeks, at which point the next task will be make the relevant changes to upgrade cleanly from Sympl 12, and fully document the process.

2 Likes
2

As always your efforts are always appreciated. The file system changes feature looks very interesting.

3

That’s reassuring to hear. Thank you for this.

4

Your efforts are greatly appreciated Paul.

5

Thanks for this, good to know that things are continuing.

6

Debian 13, Trixie with Sympl is an option when generating a new vm? Is this stable and without issues?

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Yes, it should be stable enough for production now - I’ve not encountered any issues with my testing setup, but as always do report any issues.

8

That’s outstanding, thank you very much for your enduring work.

9

I’ve finally got my VMs up to Debian Bookworm. Any word on when an ‘official’ release for Trixie is likely?

Thanks for your efforts as ever.

Andy

10

Hey @Kelduum - spotted a little bug - i just tried running php from the command-line on the server and got the error

/usr/bin/php: 78: exec: /usr/bin/php8.2: not found

looks like the file /usr/bin/sympl-php-wrapper needs tweaking to return 8.4 at the end as the default?

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Oh, thanks for spotting that @tricky - fix applied and pushed out to the sympl-web package.

12

How near are we to a “safe to upgrade” situation?

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At the moment I’d suggest doing the upgrade cleanly by:

  1. Taking a full backup
  2. Removing all Sympl packages
  3. Dist Upgrading the OS
  4. Re-installing Sympl using the normal installation script.

Outside of the Dovecot changes there aren’t any massive differences, so it’s quite possible you can safely just Dist Upgrade, but there’s been a change to the location of the Sympl repo from http://packages.mythic-beasts.com/mythic/ to http://packages.mythic-beasts.com/sympl/, so you’d need to change the apt config properly.

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Is there benefit in waiting? Will we ever reach a point when it is a simple upgrade, or is the uninstall/reinstall approach going to be the end game?

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I’d expect more people to have tried the process and bugs will be ironed out.

Removing and then re-installing Sympl is always going to be the safest way, other than simply installing on a fresh server and migrating things one at a time, especially if you’ve made changes to configuration files outside Sympl.

The long-term plan is to have Sympl cleanly remove itself once uninstalled, leaving only user-created configuration and data behind (ie: /etc/sympl and /srv/), so packages can then be cleanly upgraded with a normal dist-upgrade, unfortunately there’s a lot to clean up as Symbiosis didn’t have an ‘upgrade’ path at all.

But even then Debian dist-upgrades can run into issues and prompts if there have been any config changes.

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