Mythtv

[daniel.mons at iinet.net.au]

 On Tue Mar 18 23:10 , Gregory Storer  sent:

>It would never have occurred to me to check 'versioning information' in
>my own little world I'd thought I should be protected from such things!

In the standard Ubuntu releases, you generally are.  Look at some key packages:

* Ubuntu Pidgin is at 2.2.1.  The Pidgin.im website has 2.4.0 as latest stable.

* Ubuntu OpenOffice is at 2.3.0.  OOo website is at 2.3.1.

* Ubuntu GIMP is at 2.4.2.  Gimp.org website is at 2.4.5.

The core Ubuntu team, even in backports, hold back on radical package upgrades in order to keep stability and reliability high.  As an ex Gentoo user, I know all too well the white-knuckle terror of upgrading a package to a new release, breaking backwards compatibility in the process and having a major part of your workflow be out of action for the next few hours/days while you struggle to fix it.  There should honestly be no need for an average user to clone/image their entire system on a weekly basis for fear of some package maintainer upgrading between major releases so frivolously.

The MythBuntu addons are not maintained by the core Ubuntu team.  It's obvious to me that they (the MythBuntu maintainers) are inexperienced with both the concept of a stable release, as well as Ubuntu's packaging philosophy in general.  Given that new releases of Ubuntu are pushed out every 6 months like clockwork, it really isn't that much to ask a package maintainer to hold off major upgrades for the next release.  Particularly in this case where 8.04 is literally a month away, and all major package version bumps could be held off until then.

Browsing the Ubuntu forums (and their dedicated MythBuntu sub-forum) yesterday, the first 2 pages are dominated by users seeking help after upgrading their MythBuntu boxes over the weekend and suffing breakages.  Other Australian forums I browse are showing the same sorts of things.  I've pretty much quoted the email response I sent to you verbatim to a number of other lists and forums these last 24 hours.

So again, while I don't absolve any user (myself included) of taking responsibility for checking package versions before upgrading, in our defense the standard Ubuntu repos are designed such that you don't normally need to.  It's testament to the Ubuntu devs and package maintainers that we have so much faith in them.  I'm hoping that the MythBuntu team also learn from this mistake, and are more conservative in their packaging in the future.

-Dan