Is a clean install required for LibreELEC 10.0.0?

1st Official Post

    I understood from the LibreELEC 10rc1 blog post that a clean install would be required. But in reading the 10.0.0 release version blog post it only notes a manual update if you are on 9.2 (and previous, presumably).

    Is a clean install required if upgrading from 9.2.6 (or previous)? Or will the usual manual update process be sufficient.

    I understand why the clean install was recommended/required. I'm just trying to plan for migrating my library, and thus watched status for my content.

    Thanks!

    • Official Post

    It depends on your knowledge/skill level. Our recommendation is still that most users do a clean install to avoid problems with add-ons which need to be replaced. If you're comfortable with the SSH console and know what files do what in Kodi, it's simple to rename the current Kodi folders out of the way, update to 10.0, then stop Kodi to migrate the important bits back into the new clean-install Kodi folders and then restart Kodi to finish the job. As a broad rule: if you don't get/understand the hints I've just dropped .. do a clean install, and if you did get them .. Good luck and off you go.

    I did grok the hints, thank you. :)

    A clean install would seem to be my preferred path. If I'm moving folders out of the way and just copying back video & music databases, it's not different to a clean install and just network transfer the two over. More or less what you said, just different.

    After a proper backup of course.

    Thanks for the confirmation. I appreciate the reply.

    heh - I decided to live dangerously and do an in-place 9.2->10 upgrade, just to see what would happen (after a full disk-image backup, natch ;) )

    I won't say it was ... painless ... but I've managed to get pretty much everything working as I like.

    Fixing/replacing the addons/plugins that were broken in the Python 2->3 transition was the longest part, but it was more a case of step repetition than anything mind bendingly difficult, once I got rid of the defunct dependency packages and updated some repos to their Matrix versions.

    The most "technical" parts were probably tracking down why some of my remote button customisations were broken - turns out that Kodi has finally gotten rid of the XBMC. prefix from the various ActivateWindow() functions (A quick search/replace operation in keymap.xml and all was good again.) and tweaking my favourite skin (Ronie's Transparency) to work as it hasn't been updated for Matrix.

    Really the only thing that doesn't work as I'd like is the TV-NextAired plugin - the Python 3 version works very differently than it's Python 2 predecessor and has a very different UI layout.

    To be honest I'm rather surprised that most of my years worth of endless tweaks and modifications and customisations to OS/Kodi/Skin/addons/settings carried over as well as they did. 8)

    I'm an old school user since XBMC on original XBox and have a pretty good idea of how things work under the hood, so your mileage may vary.

    I *certainly* wouldn't recommend doing this unless you are like me and just want to experiment - if in ANY DOUBT whatsoever follow chewitt and the rest of the LE team's advice, and do a clean install :*

    I have only a few small customizations that I have backed up separately, so my install is pretty much stock. It was way quicker and cleaner for me to blow it all up.

    Kodi migrated the MyVideos database over no problem, including watched state. The only dumb-dumb thing I did was stupidly say Yes to allow to refresh the source into the library when I was setting the scraper on the source. It created a bunch of duplicates. Had to delete the newer MyVideos database and start that part again, but this time not refreshing.

    A lot of the artwork on many of the videos seems to be missing. But that's not a show stopper and I can fix that as I go. I've seen it before.

    It's a shame that profiles isn't working properly. But there are bigger problems to tackle that the devs can make better use of their time on.