Friendica 2018.12 RC available

Today we have branched off the release candidate https://github.com/friendica/friendica/tree/2018.12-rc (RC) for the upcoming 2018.12 release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily. Over the last quarter of the year many issues were resolved, alongside with some enhancements and new features. Most noteworthy the initial support of ActivityPub https://friendi.ca/2018/11/18/activitypub-support-in-friendica/ as communication protocol between nodes in the Fediverse.

For all these changes we now feel it is time for them to get released. Before this will happen, we’d like to invite you, to test them and report back some rough edges and problems you encountered. We are especially interested in the experiences of people who are currently running the 2018.09 release of Friendica.

If you are updating from an older version then the 2018.09 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version https://friendi.ca/2018/09/23/friendica-2018-09-released/ as there were several important changes in that version. Afterwards you can continue to update to the RC branch.
How to help testing the release candidate?
Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from github. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2018.12-RC during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with a
git checkout 2018.12-rc
and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git https://github.com/friendica/friendica/blob/develop/doc/Update.md#using-git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues at github or the Friendica support https://forum.friendi.ca/profile/helpers or https://forum.friendi.ca/profile/admins forums.
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above. friendi.ca/2018/12/11/friendic…