[mythtv-users] Myth 0.21 expiring ALL shows too soon with TONS of disk space available

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/04/2012 01:22 PM, John Morris wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 22:07 -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> That suggestion was specifically for the OP in this thread--as a
>> workaround for the bug that exists in 0.21 that's affecting him.  So,
>> for him, the big benefit would be that it would prevent the bug he's
>> seeing from happening.
> Ok, just making sure.  Couldn't really think of a reason it would make a
> difference.  And reinstalling to fix work around a minor bug sounded
> like a pretty big hammer unless there were other benefits; in other
> words unless the right attitude was that it was zany to still be running
> 32bit anyway so why not just take it as a sign to get with the program.

I'd actually say it's zany to be running MythTV 0.21 before I would say 
it's zany to be running 32-bit.  :)

With MythTV 0.21, you're on your own--it's not going to get any bug 
fixes and others won't be doing testing/debugging work on it.  At least 
32-bit GNU/Linux is still generally "supported"--or at least relatively 
commonly used (even if not so much on x86).

So, IMHO, anyone using 0.21 or below should spend the time necessary to 
fix the system so it can run modern MythTV--not doing so only means 
doing so later.  And the more time that passes between when "most 
people" upgrade and when any given user does, the less people will 
remember about upgrade issues and how to fix them--not to mention the 
fact that our old database upgrade code is known to have issues with 
modern Qt and MySQL due to changes to their upstream code and the way 
current Qt/MySQL works in comparison to how they worked in the versions 
where the code was written/maintained, which is a big part of the reason 
that we dropped support for upgrading from 0.21 fixes or below database 
schema versions in 0.25.

That said, I realize time and other constraints may be a factor in the 
upgrade decision.  However, I just wanted to make it clear--just like 
GNU has said people shouldn't expect to be able to take random versions 
of GNU applications and put them together to make a working 
system--people shouldn't expect to be able to take a many, many years 
old MythTV system and upgrade to current without problems (at least not 
if expecting to keep their data).  If nothing else (ignoring changes to 
things like MySQL and Qt that can cause breakage or corruption of the 
data), you're just stacking all of the issues you would have had for all 
of the interim upgrades all together, making a much more complicated 
mess to untangle.

Mike