[mythtv-users] Upgrade risk assessment

[Marc Randolph]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 6:49 PM, Scott Traurig <straurig at comcast.net> wrote:
> Environment: ubuntu 7.10, mythtv 0.22 build 16578 (13 Mar 08)
>
> My "production machine", i.e. the machine that my wife will kick my ass if
> it doesn't remain completely stable, has recently ended 154 days of
> fabulously stable uptime and finally required a reboot.
>
> After the mandatory ass-kicking :-) I took advantage of the situation to, at
> no small risk, to apply the 100+ pending updates to ubuntu 7.10. As luck
> would have it everything appears to have turned out well.
>
> Now the million dollar question is: should I go ahead and let the Update
> Manager update the machine to ubuntu 8.04? I've heard that going to 8.04
> (Hardy) requires 0.22. The build of 0.22 I'm running pre-dates the QT4
> dependency. It would seem I'm in a good position to go forward.

Howdy Scott,

Others can speak up if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that there
is still much work to be done cleaning up the QT4 and MythUI changes,
especially with regards to themes and plugins.  The way I read it, I'd
be VERY shy about putting the current trunk (still 0.22) on a near
production machine, much less one that involves a WAF.

Separately, I don't know of a reason why you'd need to change anything
regarding your myth install just to upgrade your OS.  Hardy doesn't
"require" any particular version of Myth... I'm sure it would run most
any Myth version from the past couple years.  Having said that, while
regressions are not common, they can and definitely do occur, even
when just changing the kernel (which an OS upgrade would do in
addition to upgrading many other pieces of software that might cause
you problems).  And rolling back to the old OS may not be particularly
easy.   But then again, (tens of?) thousands of people have upgraded
without a single problem, and the few that did have problems likely
worked around those problems easily.

Have fun,

   Marc