Update problem

[RatAtAt]

I wanted to use iPlayer, so upgraded my official Humax firmware, then iPlayer worked okay.
But I then found my PC had no access to the Custom Web Interface, so I upgraded custom.
Now I find the custom features work (i.e. it has done its daily schedule backup this morning),
but I can not get TV Portal to work (neither 'Humax' nor 'iPlayer' reacts to the remote at all!)

Please advise what I need to do

 

[Black Hole]

The portal_xtra1 package is not compatible with version 1.03.xx firmware. You must remove it, and if you require custom portal facilities install new_portal instead.

Loading a standard Humax firmware kills the custom firmware just the same as an OTA update would. From version 3, the custom firmware rolls in the full Humax firmware, so just loading CF3.00/1.03.12 would have got you where you wanted to be in one step.

(It took me three readings to get the sense of the OP correct - I must be having a bad day!)

 

[RatAtAt]

Thank you - I had loaded CF3.00/1.03.12, but I needed to delete portal_xtra1 and find and install new_portal to get it working.

The outstanding question is - How can one tell which packages are no longer compatible with new releases of the main firmware?

 

[Black Hole]

Only by keeping up with the information on the wiki and this forum. If you are not a regular reader, the obvious second line is to run a search on the forum (particularly constrained to topic titles) if something stops working.

As far as I can remember, it is only the custom portals that are not compatible with 1.03.xx. Recently the WebIF has moved over to a different web server from Mongoose, but that has (in the main) happened transparently.

 

[MymsMan]

How can one tell which packages are no longer compatible with new releases of the main firmware?

Perhaps it would help if there was an 'Obsolete and Deprecated' category in the package catalogue like the "development and advanced packages" section so that inexperienced users weren't as confused by the huge list of available packages

It would also help if the packages in the webif list had a link to the appropriate page in Wiki.

 

[Ezra Pound]

The WiKi Packages page has the very first Custom TV Portal (Custom TV Portal 1.12-1) marked as 'R' for removed as it is no longer available for download, at present the second generation Custom TV Portal (Portal Extra 1) is not marked as 'R' as it is still available for download, maybe it's time to withdraw it

 

[Black Hole]

That's a moot point. Many users are still running 1.02.xx firmware, and portal-xtra1 is compatible with that (new-portal isn't), albeit without access to iPlayer and YouTube. The ideal is to state which package is incompatible with what.

However, that does not address the problem people have keeping up to date with changes. Just adding a note to a wiki entry does not mean they will be scanning for updates to the entry.

af123 runs a Twitter feed for updates to CF and packages, but that would not have caught this particular issue either.

Somebody could run a particular news feed - whether that be a Twitter or Facebook page, a wiki page, or a forum topic - but it would require sustained effort and even then users would have to be "plugged in" to it and may well ignore it if the majority of news was irrelevant to them.

No, sorry, as far as I can see there is no practical substitute to being alert to the chatter on the forum. People have decided to buy in to the CF, this is the cost.

http://hummy.tv/forum/threads/remote-scheduling-events-not-updating-the-hdr-fox-t2.4414/#post-54728

 

[RatAtAt]

Black Hole wrote:
No, sorry, as far as I can see there is no practical substitute to being alert to the chatter on the forum. People have decided to buy in to the CF, this is the cost.

Well I have used the web interface to update features every day for years,
but would have expected some alert via that process when the main firmware
was due an upgrade, and re dependencies - or did I miss something one day?

 

[Black Hole]

But the revision of the Humax firmware and the updating of the custom firmware (not packages) is not something which happens as a routine matter. The user has to decide what to install, and it has to be done by user interaction with the machine itself (it can't be done via a web interface).

It is the update of Humax firmware from 1.02.xx to 1.03.xx which causes portal-xtra1 to become moribund, not any update of the CF or packages. How do you propose that is handled?

Maybe you want the WebIF to include a function which reads the version of the Humax firmware and pops up an alert if the wrong portal package is installed? This would be adding code (and coding effort) which, for the vast majority of users, is completely irrelevant. It is an exception, and the only one I can think of.