novacut-community team mailing list archive

[Jason Gerard DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Novacut and Dmedia users be warned: in either the 13.02 (February) or
13.03 (March) release, we're going to drop support for Ubuntu Precise
and Quantal.

I know this will be a bit frustrating for folks, for which I
apologize. But on the upside: (1) you'll still be able to keep running
13.01 on Precise and Quantal, (2) the next few releases will likely be
very boring from a user's perspective anyway, and (3) you'll be able
to upgrade directly from 13.01 without loosing your current Dmedia
library or Novacut edits.

We're dropping support for Precise and Quantal because, at long last,
Dmedia is going to be officially "production ready". Over the next few
months, we'll be turning on the remaining automation behaviors,
including those scary but deeply important "copy reducing" behaviors:

https://launchpad.net/dmedia/+milestone/13.03

The biggest reason we're only supporting Raring is we need a smaller
target when validating Dmedia. By our current PPA stats, we have very
few Raring users, and that's a good thing while we turn on the
remaining Dmedia features, just in case we make goof.

By only supporting a single Ubuntu release initially, we can do deeper
validation of Dmedia. Validating Dmedia is going to take multiple
physical computers running an extended simulation (at least one week
per run). Right now, I don't have the time to personally do this
properly for more than one Ubuntu release. I'd rather have higher
confidence in supporting a single Ubuntu version than less confidence
in it working on 3 versions.

Importantly, by only supporting Raring and newer, we can drop support
for Python 3.2, only support Python 3.3 and newer. There are a number
of features new in 3.3 that I'd really like to take advantage of,
especially the new "x" mode for open().

Also, this means we only need to worry about Udisks on a single Ubuntu
release. One of my biggest worries as far as validating Dmedia is
Udisks issues preventing Dmedia from detecting a removable FileStore
in the first place. This is an area where we've had a lot of
reliability problems, but they are issues that are very hardware
dependent and mostly out of our control.

By focusing on Raring, we can have a higher-quality Dmedia release
ready when Ubuntu 13.04 starts shipping on hardware, just in case
Dmedia starts shipping on hardware around that time (wink, wink).

And although it would be nice to keep supporting Novacut and Dmedia on
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I think it's far more important to be forward
looking and focus on making Novacut and Dmedia amazing on Ubuntu 14.04
LTS.

If you have questions or concerns about any of this, please ask :)