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. If someone started selling a "Black Box" cnc controller with Linuxcnc and the average user was unaware what was inside how often would they be wanting updates, not often or maybe wouldn't even think about. Even more so if the install was a Just Enough OS to run Linuxcnc, similar to what libreelec do with Kodi. I used to work for a company that installed "Zero Gravity Treadmills" all the control was done by a PC running Win2k and later it was migrated to Linux. None of the customers cared about updates just as long the machine ran. These were installed in gyms, physios and some of the larger sporting teams, Rugby League, Aussie Rules & Rugby Union. Even the Australian Institute of Sport had a couple. If the user doesn't know what's under the hood they don't really care. I just treat my Linuxcnc machine as "black box" as long as it runs, it's good. 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. As for updating the OS...... there's enough users have trouble installing Linuxcnc after being given basic instructions. 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 On 20/4/20 4:47 am, Chris Morley wrote:
Why does end of life matter to a machine controller? Once you have a kernel/motherboard/distro combination that woks, I wouldn't want to upgrade the distro unless I had to, because it probably will become painful. If it is easy enough to keep support of an old distro then why not? One optional driver not compiling does not seem a good reason to drop support. Eventually we will need to but that is not a good enough reason IMHO. Chris ________________________________ From: René Hopf via Emc-developers <emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net> Sent: April 19, 2020 4:58 PM To: emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net <emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net> Cc: René Hopf <reneh...@googlemail.com> Subject: [Emc-developers] old distros Hi, I added the EOL date of the official distros to the wiki: http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MinimumSoftwareVersions Notice that only stretch and buster are not near end of life. Recently there have been 2 PRs with code that doesn’t work on old compilers. https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/689 https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/714 I don’t understand why we support distros that have been released 8 years ago. Making newer stuff work on legacy software is just a waste of developers time. If people can’t be bothered to update the distro, why would they be bothered to update linuxcnc? As far as Im aware everything works on stretch. After a short discussion with jepler on irc, he mentioned that it hasn’t been decided to drop support, and its unclear on how to decide stuff like this. My proposal: Keep 2.8 as it is, as it's near the release. Drop support for anything earlier than Stretch in master, and as soon as python3 support is working, drop support for python2 in master. Python2 is EOL since January, and it's not feasible to support both. Rene _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
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