[mythtv] MythTV life-cycle support intentions

[Steven Adeff]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 12:45 PM, John Pilkington <J.Pilk at tesco.net> wrote:
> On 24/07/12 02:53, Gavin Hurlbut wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Jean-Yves Avenard <jyavenard at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> If people want support, they can update to the latest version.
>
> I think it should be recognised that many people - and even some on the
> mailing lists - don't want support;  they want a system that will work and
> won't cause domestic stress.  That implies that a new release should be
> fully tested /for its old features/ as well as the new.  I'm not convinced
> that that always happens.  As things are, a mature fixes build would
> probably be the best option for this group.  Suggesting that they should all
> switch asap to a new release is unrealistic.  New problems will surface as
> more of them gradually upgrade.  I would hope that these would still warrant
> attention from the devs, although I recognise the allure of the bleeding
> edge :-)

a lot of that is because most users are not willing to test during the
beta and release candidate period on a live system, so issues are not
found until more do run it. nature of the beast, and why the -fixes
branch exists.There is also initial hesitation after a release for
many to install it for fear of these bugs as well, but without more
people testing sometimes bugs take a long time to get discovered.
Again, I'm not really sure how to overcome that without the devs
having more test systems, something which is also difficult to expect.

If memory serves me correctly, the first few weeks after a major
release all the dev's are in new-bugs-found squashing mode as those
come in, before beginning back at added feature work for the next
release.

I'd say, it is generally the case that regressions don't occur often,
and they seem to be fixed as soon as a good bug report is submitted.
I'll add that sometimes getting that bug report requires some extra
help of the devs to the user that doesn't occur, but that may just
need a better wiki entry?

I do think that the problem is that regression bugs tend to show up in
big ways, like the current LiveTV bug, or the scheduler bug that was
causing the backend to freeze on people. But these are being
addressed, so it falls into the "warranted attention has been
provided" group.

BUT, that said, I don't see why support for more than a single older
version should be required. the big driving factor to updates is
hardware advances (VDPAU, CableCards, etc), so if someone with older
hardware is still running, say 0.24, I imagine at this point they're
pretty happy with how it works and the features it has, or they would
upgrade. Except for a few minor exceptions no loss of hardware support
has occurred that made a huge adverse affect on 99% of users, so even
those people could upgrade to 0.26 and all their hardware should still
work.

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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