Difference in perspective

Posted May 24, 2025 18:17 UTC (Sat) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188)
In reply to: An ongoing theme with the developers by donbarry
Parent article: Home Assistant deprecates the "core" and "supervised" installation modes

Another perspective is that nowadays, containers and VMs have made it possible for an application to take advantage of recent versions of its dependencies, without having to worry about them being unavailable on the target platform. From that perspective, they are a huge improvement.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 24, 2025 21:02 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (6 responses)

No, this just create a house of card situation where bugs cannot be fixed.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 24, 2025 23:25 UTC (Sat) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (5 responses)

Could you elaborate? I don't see how your statement follows.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 25, 2025 8:18 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (4 responses)

So you have a container with a mountain of hard-coded dependencies, one of which is buggy, and all of this lives in a Docker image which you got from the net.

It's not at all easy to replace that module there. In a "real" installation you can just update the requirements file with the version# with the bugfix and restart HomeAssistant.

That being said, this is for end users. A user won't muck about with Docker images, but then they wouldn't know how to edit their Supervised installation either (not without messing it up anyway). The user files the bug, somebody else notifies upstream with a fix, and you get that in the next regular update.

Actually *running* HA in Supervised mode will continue to work because they (and we) need that mode for development and testing. It'll just not be end-user-supported by them. After all, you can't rebuild a Docker image or re-provide+-boot your appliance every time you fix a typo, that'd take much too long.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 25, 2025 9:49 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

And in addition , this encourages supporting only the latest version of the dependencies instead of the most tested and most reliable. So anybody whose system is slightly different from upstream CI will hit bugs that upstream will flag as
"nonreproducible".

Difference in perspective

Posted May 25, 2025 11:36 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> After all, you can't rebuild a Docker image or re-provide+-boot your appliance every time you fix a typo, that'd take much too long.

On the contrary, it's increasingly common these days that the only build artifact produced is a docker image.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 25, 2025 18:52 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Python is a script language. No sane developer is going to wait for a Docker build on every edit-test-debug cycle.

Difference in perspective

Posted May 25, 2025 18:56 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Actually *running* HA in Supervised mode will continue to work because they (and we) need that mode for development and testing. It'll just not be end-user-supported by them. After all, you can't rebuild a Docker image or re-provide+-boot your appliance every time you fix a typo, that'd take much too long.

The way the HA environment is set up, you can create "patches" in the `config/custom_components` folder, the Python file loader looks there first. So you can replicate the directory structure of the affected package and patch individual files. Once you're done, you can do a full-blown build.

And even for the core development, you don't need the full Supervised mode. Just clone the repo and install dependencies for the core and the parts that you want to change.