Decoupling Moode from the OS

[Miss Sissy Princess]

Are there any plans to decouple Moode Audio from the OS. I like the product, but I don't like the fact that I can't update the Raspberry Pi OS that ships with Moode Audio without potentially breaking Moode Audio.

I understand that I am not a Moode developer. I'm not making a demand here, or a feature request. Just curious if there are plans to make Moode Audio a repository instead it's own OS.

I can't speak for the moOde developers, but I am a developer with decades of experience so I can speak in general terms about your request.  

You can't decouple" moOde from the OS because it relies on the OS, and not just for simple, asynchronous I/O.  moOde is very much dependent on timing, CPU loading, etc.  If you update something in the OS that moOde relies on, it can potentially "break" moOde.  You could even update something moOde does not directly rely on and find that the update is doing something harmful, such as causing excessive interrupt latency, that interferes with moOde.

What makes moOde so darned reliable is that it can be tested as a complete, integrated system.  What makes it so supportable is binary consistency; your v7.3.0 is the same as everyone else's v7.3.0.  If you report 'stuttering' playback, the developers don't have to go down the path of determining every OS component that you have updated, and then evaluating whether the update in question, alone or in combination with your other updates, could have lead to the problem.

Look at a Marantz NA6006, a commercial network audio player.  It's based on Linux, but Marantz doesn't support upgrading the Linux kernel and components separately from the Marantz device-specific application(s).  I can't speak for Marantz's engineers, but I strongly suspect it's for those same reasons.