On 4/19/20 10:58 AM, René Hopf via Emc-developers wrote:
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.
Thanks, that's helpful info!
I've seen a misconception in this thread, incorrectly claiming that
EOL'ed distros cannot be installed or updated. This is wrong: both
Debian and Ubuntu still have the apt archives online for all the old
EOL'ed distros we currently support. The buildbot runs "apt-get update"
and uses apt-get to install any missing build dependencies on every
build, on every platform.
I added the apt sources used to the MinimumSoftwareVersions wiki page
linked above.
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
That's a real bummer, and a very good argument for dropping support for
old distros. However:
I don’t understand why we support distros that have been released 8 years
ago.
It's because of a perception among some of us developers (myself
included) that our users are not Linux experts, and don't like upgrading
the OS on their CNC machines.
I *think* a common user behavior is to build or convert a CNC machine,
install LinuxCNC from whatever ISO is currently on our website, and then
let the machine auto-update itself from the Debian/Ubuntu deb archive
and the LinuxCNC deb archive (on www.linuxcnc.org, not the buildbot).
It's pretty easy for non-expert users to notice the little "upgrades are
available!" notification and click "Install" (and we try hard to make it
so that never breaks an existing LinuxCNC installation), but it's much
harder to upgrade a running machine from Ubuntu Precise to Debian
Buster, or even from Debian Wheezy to Debian Buster.
That's why we've historically tried to support old distros for as long
as possible.
My proposal:
Keep 2.8 as it is, as it's near the release.
Seconded.
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.
I suggest instead only dropping support for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise in
master, and keeping Wheezy and newer. This gets us to gcc 4.7, which
has nearly complete support for C++11.
Precise has gcc 4.6 which predates C++11 support:
https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html#cxx11
I agree that transitioning from python2 to python3 would be a valuable
effort. I added the python3 versions to MinimumSoftwareVersions wiki page.
--
Sebastian Kuzminsky
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