Announcement: End of support for Debian Wheezy

[Schooner]

Hi All,

Debian Wheezy was handed over to the LTS team in April 2016, with no official Debian support, updates or backports.
On 31st May 2018 all support will cease.

Before this date however, some upcoming changes to the Machinekit code will mean the end of Wheezy package production for Machinekit.

czmq4 has changed its API quite markedly, so as to be backwardly incompatible with the czmq in current use.
Work has been done to port Machinekit, which uses czmq quite heavily, to the new API.

Debian Stretch repos already contain the new czmq4 library packages and work is ongoing to start package production for Stretch.
Machinekit specific czmq4 packages based on the later code, have been created for Jessie.
However there is no intention to backport down to Wheezy, as it is near complete termination.

Therefore when the new code is merged into Machinekit, package production for Wheezy will cease.
The existing Wheezy packages will be retained for the foreseeable future.

Users are encouraged where possible to upgrade to Jessie, which has a few years life left in it. (will be LTS until April 2020)

Before too long there should be the option to use Stretch also.

regards

[schoo...@btinternet.com]

Just a notification NOT to update packages or do a fresh pull of
machinekit packages or any czmq / zeromq libs until further advised

If you do, you are liable to get machinekit and lib versions which do
not match and will not run.

This is to allow building of new packages and insertion of related libs
to the repo.

Thanks for your co-operation

[schoo...@btinternet.com]

Just to let you know that the work on the repo has now finished and it is back up.

The changes only affect Jessie packages for Machinekit

There is no need to upgrade packages, the new ones do not do anything different, just use an altered API.

If you do and have problems upgrading the first time you try, remove the old packages first
eg.
apt-get purge machinekit machinekit-<flavour> libczmq* libzmq* python-zmq
(check what it proposes to remove to be sure it has not included anything you want to keep)

Preferably then go into /var/cache/apt/archives and manually delete the old packages,
so long as you feel confident about doing so.

Then
apt-get update
apt-get install machinekit machinekit-<flavour>
All the other packages required will be fetched as dependencies