Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Fri, 25 May 2012 12:00:57 -0500

On 5/25/12 11:07 AM, Andrew Johnson wrote:
> Hi Dirk,
> 
> On 2012-05-25 Dirk Zimoch wrote:
>> Eric Norum wrote:
>>> I'm actually kind of surprised that StreamDevice 2-5 (the latest, right?)
>>> even works with ASYN from over five years ago.
>>
>> With every change in StreamDevice I am very careful not to break
>> compatibility with earlier versions of asyn and base. You can run the
>> current StreamDevice version with asyn 4-6 and base 3.14.7 (or even
>> 3.13.9 with some tricks) if you like. Sometimes I wish other people
>> would spend that effort too.
> 
> I regard new features and bug fixes as an incentive to get people to upgrade 
> their IOCs to newer versions of Base.  Otherwise we have to continue to 
> support ancient versions of the code, and they keep hitting old bugs.

Hi, Andrew.

I think Dirk's approach is very nice.  Any change to a system
increases the chance of introducing some kind of problem.  If I
want to keep a system as stable as possible, I don't change it
(or I change it as little as possible).  Dirk's approach enables
me to do that.

Of course, I understand your desire to get people to upgrade.
If I were you, I would simply state what releases of EPICS Base
you support.  Outside of that, people are on their own, and you
don't have to waste your time fixing, or helping people with,
old bugs.  It's completely reasonable that you can't support a
ton of old releases, so don't.  As an example, the OpenBSD
project releases every six months.  They support the current
release and the previous one--that's it. They do this because
they don't have the resources to support more than that, and
they'd rather focus on new features.

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System