Encoding::UndefinedConversionError since today's upgrade.

[Aldarone]

Hello I am the admin of witches.town and I updated my instance this morning. However, the toots aren't federating anymore, my users can't follow or boost anyone and I'm seeing this error all over the logs :

web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.285964614Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8] method=POST path=/api/v1/statuses/120331/favourite format=html controller=Api::V1::StatusesController action=favourite status=500 error='Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8' duration=66.97 view=0.00 db=11.48
web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.287485626Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8]   
web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.287554509Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8] Encoding::UndefinedConversionError ("\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8):
web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.287708976Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8]   
web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.287748374Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8] app/services/favourite_service.rb:16:in `call'
web_1        | 2017-04-07T07:54:55.287866350Z [54648852-d910-4b17-85b0-eeb750093bd8] app/controllers/api/v1/statuses_controller.rb:95:in `favourite'

Do you know how I can fix this ?

---

• I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[Aldarone]

It seems the same issue affect mastodon.social too. I'm reverting 6d6a429 to see if it comes from here.

[Aldarone]

Yep, that was it.

[nolanlawson]

Question: is now a good time to start thinking about semantic versioning for Mastodon? Pulling from master seems very risky, if for no other reason than that various instances could be on various commits of the codebase, making it hard to track down bugs.

Then again, setting up SemVer inherently creates extra maintenance burden for @Gargron and so maybe it wouldn't be possible without more committers. Let us know what we can do to help! 😊

(Context: I maintain https://toot.cafe/)

[mkody]

I can confirm that Encoding::UndefinedConversionError ("\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8) was happening on my instance as well.
But I was able to boost and follow users.

[hishamhm]

Semantic versioning can be used two ways: 0.x for early stage development or x.y.z for stable development. The x.y.z model is indeed extra burden because of compatibility guarantees, etc. But at this point, with fast-paced updates where everyone is encouraged to just keep upgrading to the latest one, the 0.x model seems more appropriate.

However, 1.0 was tagged already. In any case, tagging known-stable commits as "releases" (even if daily and not following semantic versioning: 1.2017.04.07.1 perhaps?) could help instance admins to make it easier to know (a) if they're running the same version of the code and (b) which of two instances are more up-to-date.

[Gargron]

What I wanted was to make semi-big tagged releases (1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc) and have instance admins pin their installation to a tag. But 1.1 is so outdated now I can understand why people want latest master. Maybe we need a "stable" branch,

[Gargron]

Anyway, I have pushed a fix for this, it's live on .social and seems to be working. Please confirm and if it's fixed for you also, close issue!

[ggramaize]

I confirm the fix you pushed solved the issue on my instance.
The federation jobs now run successfully on sidekiq.

[Sigafoos]

Shouldn't master be the stable branch? Then you can have a develop branch that gets code merged in once it's been tested/verified. And instances can run off the bleeding edge code if they want the newest features/to help test.

[nolanlawson]

master/stable makes sense to me. Sometimes it's useful to eagerly accept PRs to master, test them in dev, and then push to stable.

OTOH having some kind of versioning shorthand would be useful for chatting about them on Mastodon itself, e.g. stable-1.1.0, stable-2.0.1, stable-3.1.1 or something like that. Maybe a major version bump could indicate that you need to do a database migration or a bundle install, a minor version would be a feature add, and a patch would be a bugfix.

FWIW I am tooting about this with the #MastodonAdmins tag.