[mythtv-users] 30 vs 31

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 8:21 AM jam <jam at tigger.ws> wrote:

> Dave the only reason I see is that the devs are interestested in 31 but not in auld stuff like 30.

I think the correct way to say this is that the developers
focus on moving forward, and not looking backwards,
and while efforts will be made to attempt to address
issues in the most current stable release (v31), just as
has always been the practice, previous releases of
MythTV will get fixes far less often, and typically only
for very specific point issues that are considered high
impact, after a newer stable release is made available.

That does not mean to imply that v30 (or previous
releases) will stop working, but if you have any issue
do expect to be asked to reproduce that issue on at
least the latest stable release (since that issue may
have been fixed directly, or indirectly) and if there was
recent work in a related part of MythTV, you may be
asked to test the master branch.

> If you build from source, unlike previous releases I’ve
> looked at, 30 won't *easily* build on o modern distro like ubuntu 20.04 suse leap 15.2 or I imagine any of the fedora line.

I think one of the biggest changes is that many
modern distros have removed or deprecated
python2 support, and pre-v31 versions of MythTV
required python2 for a number of ancillary functions.
If one is planning to move to a more modern distro,
one should expect to also need to upgrade their
versions of many apps, and that includes MythTV
(or expect to need to perform some gyrations and
gymnastics, depending on the distro, to get
python2 support installed).

> By same token 31 won’t build on older distros.

v31 will mostly build on older distros (if the old is not
too old, and one installs later version of some of the
dependencies; I semi-regularly test build v31 and
master for CentOS 7, and that is mostly considered
ancient in Internet time, and I have even (very)
experimentally build v31 on CentOS 7 with only
python3 rather than python2 requirements), but the
MythTV project has a target to build/run on the
latest stable releases of the major distros when
viable, and does not regularly test older versions
those distros, so I am sure some older distros will
no longer build v31.