Re: [gpsd-users] GPS fix last to long

[Tomalak Geret'kal]

On 06/09/2012 21:40, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> Yo Tomalak!
>
> On Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:10:18 +0100
> "Tomalak Geret'kal" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > While your intent is noble, 2.95 is not *that* old and out
> > in the real world where gpsd may be used via interface with
> > proprietary codebases and where (right or wrong) there is
> > insufficient top-down support for devoting time to support
> > updates, your "commandment" rings a little flat. I was
> > fortunate to have enough clout to drive an upgrade to 3.x,
> > but given that 3.0 wasn't even released a year ago, I
> > imagine I'm quite in the minority outside of academic circles.
> Yes, 3.0 is not that old, but the older gpsd interface had been
> deprecated for much longer than that.  Any distro that can't work with a
> several year warning has problems of their own making.

There are other things in the world besides mainstream Linux 
distros that use gpsd.

And I refer not just to the interface itself but to code 
that may be broken within 2.95, like the problem that the OP 
found.

A slightly less extreme example would be the serious v3.2 
control socket bug that I identified on this list back on 
4th April of this year. Had the reaction then been "you 
shouldn't be using v3.2; use v3.4" then that would not have 
been very helpful; fortunately, it was not, and Eric both 
verified my 3.2 patch and fixed the problem for 3.5 onwards.

(As I initially began to write the previous paragraph I 
hoped that I'd found the bug in v2.95, as then the "couldn't 
upgrade gpsd due to no appropriate place in internal 
development plan to support interface change" argument would 
be somewhat more relevant. Alas, as I researched for it I 
found this not to be so. Oh well...)

> No point taking patches for things that are already patched and fixed in
> later revs, we are not as big as the Linux kernel where we can support
> multiple forks.
I don't disagree with that. The project is (marginally) too 
small to bother with a v2-maintenance branch. For the most 
part, where no alternative is available, users can fork 
their own patched 2.95 as the require until such time as 
they can upgrade to and support a version of gpsd with the 
fix officially applied.

But that is quite different from the assertion that "no one 
should be using 2.95."

Tom