You can export to specific versions using 2012b, but since Matlab doesn't announce what is and isn't compatible between versions, it makes it impossible to cater for everyone unless you export to each and every version (which is a very time-consuming process).
While I agree that it's not fair to force users to upgrade to the latest versions all the time, I also think it's unreasonable to expect maintainers to backport patches to each and every old version. The precedent was set years ago when we dropped support for iBOBs and BEE2s. When Mathworks or Xilinx stops support for certain things, so do we. Likewise, when they change model file formats, we follow suite. FWIW, we had massive issues with old versions of Simulink causing files to somehow become corrupt and it'd crash Matlab (segfault) when trying to open them. Sometimes it was so bad that just clicking "save" would break things; we had to constantly "save-as" with small incremental changes and hope that they didn't break anything or else roll-back and redo all the work. The cause of this was unknown, even though perfectly reproducable. Matlab's response when we asked them to fix it? You guessed it!: upgrade to the new version! And along with a host of other improvements, not least of which is a now-useful user-interface with much better redrawing, it does seem to be fixed in 2012b. My feeling is that if you want to use patches in your old versions of tools, then it's up to you to get patches applied. Unfortunately, git doesn't merge .mdl files, making this very hard. If we could figure-out a clean way of scripting mask generation, then we could regenerate the entire library on-the-fly, which'd go a long way towards compatibility across versions. Jason On 25 Jan 2013, at 09:40, David MacMahon wrote: > Hi, Jason, > > On Jan 24, 2013, at 4:41 AM, Jason Manley wrote: > >> I think tagged releases of the git libraries for given versions are >> appropriate. But it's certainly our intent that the SKA-SA repo will always >> reflect our latest developments, including support for the latest tools >> whenever possible. > > That's fine for you and others who like updating their tools several times a > year, but requiring folks to update their tools just to get a bug fix to the > library seems kind of harsh. For example, the current HEAD commit on the > ska-sa mlib_devel github repo (e0110e5) fixes support for ROACH DRAM, but two > of the library model files were updated using a new version of Simulink (8.0 > it looks like) that saves mask information in a way that is not compatible > with earlier versions. People (like me) who don't use this new Simulink > version but (try to) update to your latest and greatest will find that some > of the CASPER blocks (e.g. the snapshot block) no longer have masks! > > At the very least, it would be nice to have a model callback that would open > an error dialog if the user is not using a new enough version of Simulink. > Matlab does display a warning message, but given the drastic difference in > how the new Simulink version handles masks I think it should be a > hard-to-ignore error. > > Dave > > P.S. Detailed commit logs about mdl file changes would make it easier for > others to back port the fix since mdl files cannot be diff-ed in a useful > way. :-) >
