[James Ross]

Eldorado.Railroad, on 13 November 2017 - 05:07 PM, said:

I would hope that a clear indication to eliminate WinXP (but really 32 bits) in any of the Open Rails current builds/releases should be readily forthcoming by the author instead of users "discovering it" the hard way. I hope we have not forgotten that Win7 still exists in 32 bit form and is not in EOL yet.

Open Rails itself will likely continue to support 32bit even when we stop supporting Windows XP, but that will all be sorted out and communicated when the time comes.

The contributed programs, however, are not supported to the same extent/effort, and are provided very much on a "best effort" basis in pretty much all regards (including whether they run at all).

Eldorado.Railroad, on 13 November 2017 - 05:07 PM, said:

Win XP is only a "few" years out of support and like so many others who do useful work, I still use it. I spend more time working than upgrading to what Redmond thinks I should give up my privacy for, not to mention Intel's ME. "Unsupported" software does not mean useless software.

I certainly don't think it is useless software, however, it is written in a completely different language to everything else we include (Pascal rather than C#/NET) and there are therefore extra burdens to supporting it.

The main issue here is my sanity and security: to keep myself secure, I need to keep all software on my computer updated, which I do via Chocolatey for anything that doesn't update itself. I use the Lazarus package for the Pascal compiler. They are the ones that made the switch to 64bit which caused this problem in the first place, rather than me or anyone else making any explicit change. The issue here is that there is no package for installing the 32bit add-on, which means that every single time the main Lazarus compiler is updated I will need to remember to manually go and get the add-on and install that too. This is a burden I don't want and will avoid at all costs.

Eldorado.Railroad, on 13 November 2017 - 05:07 PM, said:

So if we are "h e l l bent" on dumping Win XP with version 1.3 of Open Rails, all of the releases up to that point should work in Win XP. When version 1.3 is released I hope it is worth all the "displacement" with triple the performance, otherwise why did we dump the 32 bit version in the first place?

We will be dropping Windows XP but not necessarily 32bit - and it'll be after 1.3. People have already reported significant memory savings and potentially reasonable performance improvements, although it is still very much a work-in-progress right now, so don't take anything as absolutely guaranteed.

[mbm_OR]

James, I would like to thank you for your comments to avoid any misunderstanding.

Regards,
Mauricio

[Eldorado.Railroad]

James Ross, on 14 November 2017 - 01:43 PM, said:

The main issue here is my sanity and security: to keep myself secure, I need to keep all software on my computer updated, which I do via Chocolatey for anything that doesn't update itself. I use the Lazarus package for the Pascal compiler. They are the ones that made the switch to 64bit which caused this problem in the first place, rather than me or anyone else making any explicit change. The issue here is that there is no package for installing the 32bit add-on, which means that every single time the main Lazarus compiler is updated I will need to remember to manually go and get the add-on and install that too. This is a burden I don't want and will avoid at all costs.

Ah Pascal, one the first languages from my university days.

I can empathize with your predicament. If you have one and only one machine to do everything, at least that is how it reads, you are going to have a mess that you would like to keep as tidy as possible. For reasons of sanity, not unlike yourself, I gave up on the idea of one machine fits all, yet alone one O/S fits all. Would it not be more expedient to have a machine (virtual machine??) that is used for Open Rails related project (especially compilation)? Yes it involves more expense, but the trade off is not having to constantly upgrade a machine that is used for a specific purpose, and hence a mostly "static" software setup. This is what I do.

I think the issue of Lazarus is precisely because of Chocolatey. I have a web link that allows for specific versions of Lazurus to downloaded, 32 or 64 bit, no extra downloads required.
Lazarus Downloads

Since I also use Linux, I have issues with package managers "willy nilly" doing upgrades that consign some perfectly good working software setups to the rubbish bin. When it comes to individual packages I am much more conservative. There is nothing that I upgrade (or install) to, that I have not made provision for in a backup to return to, this includes one at a system level. The "things going wrong" happens way too often during "upgrades/installations".

It is my opinion that the main source of security issues are from the internet. Keeping a web browsing machine up to date, as well as using a browser that allows for atomic control of how javascript is run is a headache I would not want attached to a machine that I do important work on. I am writing this on a credit card size computer running Linux, and with that I need not worry that my source code etc on a Windows machine will be eaten up by ransomware. If I am unsure of some website(s), or even for casual "dangerous" browsing, I boot up a live distribution of Linux, that has a mostly up to date web browser on a Windows machine.

[James Ross]

Eldorado.Railroad, on 16 November 2017 - 05:55 AM, said:

I can empathize with your predicament. If you have one and only one machine to do everything, at least that is how it reads, you are going to have a mess that you would like to keep as tidy as possible. For reasons of sanity, not unlike yourself, I gave up on the idea of one machine fits all, yet alone one O/S fits all. Would it not be more expedient to have a machine (virtual machine??) that is used for Open Rails related project (especially compilation)? Yes it involves more expense, but the trade off is not having to constantly upgrade a machine that is used for a specific purpose, and hence a mostly "static" software setup. This is what I do.

A virtual build environment is certainly not a bad idea (I have played about with using AppVeyor to build Open Rails, for example), but I nevertheless would not want to keep the tools static within it. It may not be clear why, but security issues with compilers/libraries tend to be that they have created a security problem for the compiled code/program.

Eldorado.Railroad, on 16 November 2017 - 05:55 AM, said:

I think the issue of Lazarus is precisely because of Chocolatey. I have a web link that allows for specific versions of Lazurus to downloaded, 32 or 64 bit, no extra downloads required.
Lazarus Downloads

I might be able to override the Lazarus's package choice to use 64bit on my machine, although that is likely quite fragile. But there is also blame for Lazarus itself not including 32bit support in the 64bit version, and for not having a Chocolatey package for the add-on.

(I looks like I can use the option --x86 with Chocolatey, to force the 32bit version to install, but I am fairly sure that on the first upgrade it'll be lost unless I specifically upgrade Lazarus separately.)

Eldorado.Railroad, on 16 November 2017 - 05:55 AM, said:

Since I also use Linux, I have issues with package managers "willy nilly" doing upgrades that consign some perfectly good working software setups to the rubbish bin. When it comes to individual packages I am much more conservative. There is nothing that I upgrade (or install) to, that I have not made provision for in a backup to return to, this includes one at a system level. The "things going wrong" happens way too often during "upgrades/installations".

If the packages themselves are not set up for what I need (in this case, 32bit support in Lazarus on a 64bit machine) there is little I can do except pin them in Chocolatey, which will prevent it upgrading/changing in any way. Having a backup is not particularly useful when I want the upgrades.

Eldorado.Railroad, on 16 November 2017 - 05:55 AM, said:

It is my opinion that the main source of security issues are from the internet. Keeping a web browsing machine up to date, as well as using a browser that allows for atomic control of how javascript is run is a headache I would not want attached to a machine that I do important work on. I am writing this on a credit card size computer running Linux, and with that I need not worry that my source code etc on a Windows machine will be eaten up by ransomware. If I am unsure of some website(s), or even for casual "dangerous" browsing, I boot up a live distribution of Linux, that has a mostly up to date web browser on a Windows machine.

I sounds like you have a much more involved set-up than I am prepared to consider. :)

[James Ross]

James Ross, on 18 November 2017 - 02:36 PM, said:

(I looks like I can use the option --x86 with Chocolatey, to force the 32bit version to install, but I am fairly sure that on the first upgrade it'll be lost unless I specifically upgrade Lazarus separately.)

I have reinstalled Lazarus with this option, so the next build may well work on 32bit systems, but I am fairly sure this will break as soon as there is a new version of Lazarus released.

[mbm_OR]

James Ross, on 18 November 2017 - 03:04 PM, said:

I am fairly sure this will break as soon as there is a new version of Lazarus released.

I had read from this web page, the following text:
"When you upgrade every version it will keep --forcex86 unless you pass --ignore-remembered-arguments and do not pass it as part of the upgrade arguments."

Regards,
Mauricio

[James Ross]

mbm_OR, on 18 November 2017 - 03:34 PM, said:

I had read from this web page, the following text:
"When you upgrade every version it will keep --forcex86 unless you pass --ignore-remembered-arguments and do not pass it as part of the upgrade arguments."

Cool. Let's hope it works. :)

[James Ross]

James Ross, on 18 November 2017 - 04:53 PM, said:

Cool. Let's hope it works. :)

Alas this did not work, but that was because the "useRememberedArgumentsForUpgrades" feature of Chocolatey is still not enabled by default. I've now enabled it, reinstalled Lazarus with --x86 and it seems to remember it - so hopefully this is properly solved.