Dropping Measurements, Hello High-End.

[hkphantomgtr]

People who knew me personally would know I used to work in Oceanography and Meteorology fields as a software engineer. In that job I learnt a lot about measuring the physical world. Knowing what I know it is a fact that audio measurements is a pseudo science. It has led so many down the wrong path, and in fact is the genesis of this project - Snakeoil. Unless you're fixing your equipment, measurements in audio is generally bad. It is snakeoil, and I'm cursed to pick this topic as the codename for 1.3.0. 

Due to time constraints, I'm pivoting and moving away from shell installers. Going to do packages instead - For Ubuntu that'll be a .deb file. There are a lot of good reasons to use a single shell installer, however, everything is negated by my lack of time on the project. So the move to a deb will provide the following advantage:

1. Once the package is available for your distribution, it will work on your distribution always. The old shell installer has some dependencies that just cannot be resolved easily between distributions. This is why existing Snakeoil will work on one version, but flaky on others. Recompiling everything is just a time I do not have.
   

This is it really. While this seems trivial it is going to solve a lot of the installation woes people have today. Basically all you need now is to install the base OS, then install the Snakeoil package and you're good to go.

Downside of this is I will need to build the environments for this to happen. For each distribution I will need to create a build environment. This is pretty time consuming and I managed to spin up to build environments so far:

1. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for Intel/AMD systems (64 bit)
   
2. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi (64 bit)
   

In other words, the burden is transferred from you the user to me the developer. 

This means a version bump to 1.4.0, and with the codename (High-end). If folks are new to Snakeoil, and want to install, please start with these base installation first. Support for other distributions will come in time. There are still some things I need to learn/do:

1. Figure out a way to host my own repository so people can just run "apt-get install snakeoil" to update Snakeoil. This will do away with the firmware files
   
2. Update the snakeoil API backend  server to use something like go or rust.
   
3. Update the snakeoil front end WebApp
   

Now with the change to deb files you folks have to always install Snakeoil from official sources (i.e. this forum). Do not install any Snakeoil packages that's not hosted by this project. 

When will 1.4.0 be released? I honestly don't know. It will be released once I've managed to create the deb file successfully. Updating the snakeoil software can come in time. Calling out to developers who are interested to help out as Snakeoil is an open source project.

Unsure how many are still using Snakeoil, but for those who are still here, I thank you. And hope to get back to this more than I could in the past 2 years or so... Thank you for your support. And happy listening!

Thanks a lot for your effort and endeavour in SO.  We enjoy very much and benefit a lot from SO.  Good Work!  
Above all, please take good care of yourself and get enough rest first.  God Bless You!!