[mythtv-users] How to avoid upgrade headaches

[Johnny]

> Why would they not put QT4 into their repositories but rather make you do a
> complete upgrade? Are other distros this way? I can't imagine that distros
> that upgrade every 1-2 years would do this, but I may be wrong.

Yes this is standard. Once a release is made, they don't generally add
*new* software to it. That is basically the definition of a release.
They update and fix bugs but you don't generally add new versions,
especially not major revisions like moving to QT4. Think about what
you are saying, "Why don't they just put all of the new software into
the old release?". That is basically what they are doing but when they
get it all sorted out and working, it constitutes a new release. You
may be thinking about the fact that a fair amount of software gets
backported to older releases by various individuals. This works
sometimes when you want to update one thing but not anything else.
This works for stuff like a web browser or even mythtv (sometimes).
But when you start doing that with more foundational components like
QT4 you run into much more complex dependencies and you end up doing
more work for less value and you end up more likely to have a broken
system than if you do an upgrade.