Is it safe to upgrade to 5?

[Rellwood]

I haven't gone through all the posts, but I wanted to know if the DRM and other bugs have been worked out?

I never updated and Job Spy requires it now. Wanted to know if I should wait

[ownedbycats]

Check the DeDRM thread stickied at the top. No 5.x version is officially available yet, but the alpha version is sort of halfway functional with a few specific formats.

The Job Spy update is mostly to fix a bug specific to 5.x's Annotation Browser and the Last-Viewed Date column update. You don't need to update if you're on 4.23.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

I haven't gone through all the posts, but I wanted to know if the DRM and other bugs have been worked out?

I never updated and Job Spy requires it now. Wanted to know if I should wait

"Is it safe?" Really? Do you think upgrading will melt your motherboard?

[/I]DeDRM not working with Calibre 5 is not a "bug" - that implies an error or fault. The reality is that Calibre simply got ahead of the Apprentice in the move to Python 3. That it was no "bug" can be seen from the fact that work to help DeDRM catch up is no well underway.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

"Is it safe?" Really? Do you think upgrading will melt your motherboard?

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2006/02...mage-hardware/

Computing Myth #1: Software cannot damage hardware

Oh yes it can. Here’s a story for you: In my teens, I had a friend who got the IBM 5155 (the Portable Computer — you know, the heavy luggable one with the monochrome CRT monitor inside it) from a Computerland. He was screwing around with POKE in BASIC and POKE’d a value somewhere into CGA-land, saw some pretty squiggles for about 3 seconds, then poof and we smell the familiar smell of ozone. We went back to Computerland, but they told him that there was no way that software could have damaged hardware and they weren’t going to repair it (thinking that he had dropped it or something). So my friend, with salesman watching with one eye from across the room, walks over to another one on display, takes the diskette out, boots into BASIC, writes a 1-line program, and poof, ozone, and no more monitor. Salesman didn’t quite know what had happened, so my friend walked over to another one on display and does it again, but steps aside so that the salesman can see it this time.

Let me tell you, I’ve never seen an overweight, balding, 50+yr old move so fast. He sprang like a gazelle toward us and for a second I thought I was going to get the crap beaten out of me. Thankfully, all he did was yell, about how we were going to have to pay for that, etc. This got the attention of the manager, who came out and said they’d honor the warranty and fix his machine if the kid would stop blowing up all the IBM 5155 monitors in the store.

[Rellwood]

What I meant by "safe" was "are all the bugs worked out"

I do understand that Calibre won't destroy my computer lol.

My bad for not being clear.

[ownedbycats]

There's a few bugs in the latest stable version.

4.1 or 4.2 did have a problem that caused some plugins to simply disappear without a trace. Thankfully that was fixed.

There's some Mac users having trouble even getting it to launch, but I think you're on Windows.

The only current bug I'd consider "unsafe" on Windows is that under specific circumstances garbage data might get written to one of the config files and cause the built-in Open With to throw an error. Kovid stomped that bug, just don't add any new applications to that menu until 5.4 comes out.

Some minor bugs too that are just annoyances. The search in the Annotations Browser broke, composite columns with checkmarks showing red Xs on everything, etc. Occasional plugin bugs when a bit of code doesn't get along with newer functions.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

What I meant by "safe" was "are all the bugs worked out"

I do understand that Calibre won't destroy my computer lol.

My bad for not being clear.

Kovid has said he is going back to fortnightly releases. While there is no way that all the bugs are worked out, that makes me think thinks it is on par with 4.23.

But, if you haven't updated, I'd wait for the next release. Hopefully the DRM removal plugins will be fixed by then.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

I haven't gone through all the posts, but I wanted to know if the DRM and other bugs have been worked out?

I never updated and Job Spy requires it now. Wanted to know if I should wait

No. The tools don’t work. I found this out yesterday when I upgraded to 5.3. Managed to revert back to 4.23.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

I haven't gone through all the posts, but I wanted to know if the DRM and other bugs have been worked out?

I never updated and Job Spy requires it now. Wanted to know if I should wait

Install the portable 4.23. The copy over the settings from the full install to the portable settings. Then you can install 5.x over 4.23 and you'll have the portable 4.23 to remove DRM and 5.x for everything else.

[db105]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Install the portable 4.23. The copy over the settings from the full install to the portable settings. Then you can install 5.x over 4.23 and you'll have the portable 4.23 to remove DRM and 5.x for everything else.

If you need to remove DRM, doesn't it make more sense not to upgrade to 5.x until the DeDRM plugin is updated? I mean, does 5.x offer some new feature so important that it's worth keeping two versions of Calibre?

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by db105

If you need to remove DRM, doesn't it make more sense not to upgrade to 5.x until the DeDRM plugin is updated? I mean, does 5.x offer some new feature so important that it's worth keeping two versions of Calibre?

5.x adds annotations to ebook-viewer. Even though I use DeDRM, I decided that the new annotations feature was worth the hassle.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by db105

If you need to remove DRM, doesn't it make more sense not to upgrade to 5.x until the DeDRM plugin is updated? I mean, does 5.x offer some new feature so important that it's worth keeping two versions of Calibre?

Install 4.23 portable and copy over the settings. Then install 5.x. 5.x seems faster then 4.23.

[Rellwood]

I have two versions of Calibre running on my computer. I am just waiting until it stops being something that I can keep having. I don't know why I said I had 4.23, but I have 4.7 on 32bit and the latest 5.4 in 64bit. I think the biggest differences between having both versions didn't really show up until I installed the 5.0 version.

I have had to do quick switches between different versions of plugins when I downgrade, but I keep them handy in a folder that Calibre automatically points to when I "load plugin from file", and when I want to go back to the latest version, I just download them from the booklist page.

I have no problems opeing up the 32 bit and getting the Amazon books to import. I have however found one weird problem. If I try to delete a book in the latest 64 bit version, sometimes I get a weird popup error, something about missing a Q5 container or something like that. I don't know why it comes up or how to reproduce it, but I do know that if I close out Calibre and open up the other version it will delete.

[capink]

I don't know the cause of the problem you described, but If you are going to keep two versions of calibre using the same libraries, you are advised to use 4.23. Supposedly there were some changes to the database structure that cannot be handled by versions earlier than 4.23.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2006/02...mage-hardware/

My favorite one was a system update from Apple that destroyed the filesystem on Firewire drives that weren't made by Apple. Or the one just before the release of OS X that disabled ram that didn't have the CAS timing in its nonvolatile memory (with no advance warning).