> Well I dont doubt that you are right. But there's a difference
> between software support and a defective product.
>
> It should work. If I need support in modifying that's a different
> issue. Luckily there is this group that does the support for their
> defective distro.
Unfortunately this is a double-edged sword especially in the embedded
world. If you are just starting working on a new project then having the
latest software can only be beneficial for you. But when we release a
product and people start and then finish developing their own applications
on it and begin shipping their own product based on our product, it can be
disasterous for them if we start shipping a different, un-expected software
state on their board.
As a simple example of the trouble this can cause even in a trivial
application, we provided one customer with a simple mechanism to replicate
custom software to flash media using a PC running Linux for use on a product
we designed for them. They verified it worked, but a couple weeks later we
got a call that there were suddenly big problems - replication no longer
worked reliably - some units would get into really bad states after booting
while other units seemed to work ok. Turns out they had upgraded the Linux
distro on their PC and suddenly hot-plug started working, causing things
like auto-mounting to occur when we were trying to run simple dd commands on
the underlying media.
> If I had realised the ammount of extra work required, I probably
> would not have got into TS boards.
We could say the same thing about Linux... ;-) But as Jim mentioned the
virtue of the open source world is that even if our hands are tied from
fixing them the community as a whole is not hindered from moving forward and
improving the software on our boards.
> Having said that the h'w seem solid and well designed. It's a shame
> they don't clean up the loose ends on the s'w and save everyone
> having to reinvent that particular wheel.
There is a files section to the TS-7000 group, feel free to contribute your
improved load image. :-)
> Thanks for you thought, and help.
>
> /js
______ Best Regards,
|__ __/ Michael Schmidt
|| Software Engineer
||echnologic Systems (EmbeddedARM.com)
|| (480) 16610 East Laser Drive #10
|/ 837-5200 Fountain Hills, AZ 85268
http://oz.embeddedarm.com/~michael
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