- build stuff:
- _this is all wizard nonsense, so you can ignore it. I am mostly just noting it here for my records. tl;dr: I fixed more boot problems, now and in the future_
- just when I was getting on top of the latest boot problems, we had another one last week, caused by yet another external library that updated unusually, this time just a day after the normal release. it struck some users who run from source (such as AUR), and the macOS hotfix I put out on saturday. it turns out PySide6 6.4.0 is not yet supported by qtpy. since these big libraries' bleeding edge versions are common problems, I have updated all the requirements.txts across the program to set specific versions for qtpy, PySide2/PySide6, opencv-python-headless, requests, python-mpv, and setuptools (issue #1254)
- updated all the requirements.txts with 'python-dateutil', which has spotty default support and whose absence broke some/all of the macOS and Docker deployments last week
- added failsafe code in case python-dateutil is not available
- pylzma is no longer in the main requirements.txt. it doesn't have a wheel (and hence needs compiler tech to pip install), and it is only useful for some weird flash files. UPDATE: with the blessed assistance of stackexchange, I rewrote the 'decompress lzma-compressed flash file' routine to re-munge the flash header into a proper lzma header and use the python default 'lzma' library, so 'pylzma' is no longer needed and removed from all requirements.txts
- updated most of the actions in the build script to use updated node16 versions. node12 just started getting deprecation warnings. there is more work to do
- replaced the node12 pip installer action with a manual command on the reworked requirements.txts
- replaced most of the build script's uses of 'set-output', which just started getting deprecation warnings. there is more work to do

next week

I did not have time to do the sidecar import/export improvement, so I'll try again next week. I'd love to have 'neighbouring .txt file' support for URLs and .json/.xml, but let's see what I can manage.

Thanks everyone!