[mythtv] Status Question: Is current SVN useable?

[Stuart Morgan]

On Sunday 20 January 2008 20:32:57 Reza Naima wrote:
> But I am at a personal crossroadds and wanted advise in helping make a
> decision as I've not followed the lists closely for ages and wanted to
> see why the normal stream of newer versions stopped, and what expect
> down the pipeline.

There are multiple reasons why 0.21 has been so long in the making and I would 
probably struggle to find a single one on which everyone could agree.

One of the major ones is that Isaac, the lead dev, has been too busy for the 
last few months to be actively involved in development. Since Isaac has 
always been the driving force behind setting target dates for new releases 
we've been a little slow to set a deadline. Many developers run trunk on 
their production machines (yes, it's that stable). Most of us have forgotten 
what 0.20 was like and we've no personal motivation to release a new version.

Another reason is that whilst the project grows in size the number of active 
developers hasn't kept pace, if anything there might be less people making 
commits now than there was a year ago. That doesn't mean the project is 
stagnating, far from it, but there is a massive backlog of tickets to work 
through.

Although 0.20 couldn't be described as feature complete, it was the first 
release where many of the must-have features had finally been implemented, 
it's quite natural once you reach that point for subsequent releases to be 
fewer and further between.

There are simply too many changes, big and small since 0.20 to remember them 
all, but many are significant. SVN is probably the most stable version of 
mythtv we've ever had, even accounting for some of the recent instability 
caused by some major changes (backend auto-discovery and multirec). We're 
probably less than 2 months from a release now, we've set an arbitrary target 
in mid to late Feb but I should make clear that the date is NOT FINAL.

-- 
Stuart Morgan