If anyone has important functionality that has
broken due to, say metadata website changes, broken/missing drivers (for instance the Kobo H2O), etc. and the libimobiledevice breakage around iOS8, and wants to patch calibre 1.48 with the changes, you can run calibre from source, as mentioned earlier, using the directions here:
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/develop.html
However, make sure to clone the following repository instead. I have set up a backports branch.
Code:
git clone git://github.com/eli-schwartz/calibre
git checkout -b WinXP-backports
This is absolutely not official or sanctioned by Kovid Goyal, and I cannot commit to anything -- but as of now, I think all three changes should work just fine, and I am open to suggestions of other changes to be patched. (As long as they simply fix changes that were broken by outside sources. I am not personally going to port over calibre features and updates.)
This should allow a central way to manage calibre 1.48 hotfixes, although I do not know how much desire there is....