Since you addressed me directly. :)
On 2020-04-19 8:02 p.m., Robert Murphy wrote:
Whilst I agree with you Chris, people just want updates, without really
knowing why. This could be the case when users migrate from Windows &
Mach, but then gain how often does Mach get upgraded ?
Personally if I had an old machine that was pumping out parts with no
issues with Wheezy & 2.7 I be happy just to let it do it's thing.
I might too - but it's not up to us to decide how users update their
machines.
But more importantly It affects how future releases are handled. For
instance if it's 2+ years until 2.9 is out then forcing the use of
newer distributions is probably less of a big deal. By then we possibly
_will_ have a bunch of _necessary_ code that needs newer distribution.
If we (lol) happen to release in 6 months to a year then maybe it's
still just the two _optional_ drives that stops someone from just
updating linuxcnc rather the the whole distribution. Because updating
the distribution often is a big PITA when you are talking of kernels and
motherboards and ethernet cards etc.
We need to remember that linuxcnc packages are for users not developers
and also that over the years we have tended (unintentionally) to
encourage the use of master branch.
I found this with the Mint ISOs, I'd do a release with Linuxcnc built
from the latest 2.8 sources and people were wanting to know how to
update.
I started to think that not many people were actually using the images
to run a machine, as there was very very little feed back on that, they
just wanted to install and be able to update.
One user admitted to not knowing what Mint was but went and installed it
on his machine anyways, then was wanting updated packages for Linuxcnc.
This is because you were making packages for a branch that was still
being added to. Some guys had qtvcp problems I pushed a fix - they
didn't get it cause their package doesn't automatically update...
It's really the projects fault for waiting so long to release 2.8. Not
that was on purpose.
As for updating the OS...... there's enough users have trouble
installing Linuxcnc after being given basic instructions.
This is not a good reason to make limit choices for users.
It may seems like all users have trouble but of course if they had no
trouble you probably wouldn't hear from them, so it tends to magnify
that gut feeling.
Ideally a virtual package could be of use, user installs Debian or a
Ubuntu variant, adds the repo to the apt sources, then does "sudo
apt-get install awesome-machine-controller" and it installs a kernel and
the matching linuxcnc version and the deps for qtvcp. Have one each for
RT_PREEMPT & RTAI
Yes I'm sure there are other ways to release - I'm not up on new stuff.
But it would really help to have more developers active in the project.
That has been an on going problem too.
Anyways the point was to have a discussion and i think that is done.
Chris
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