Alex Froio

days since had to build ffmpeg from scratch: 0

Currently trying to write out a test plan for some hardware we put together off the shelf to do a bit of data collection on the raspberry pi and... One of the fields is software version.

Which means all these Linux utilities on the pi need to get a version lock. Which means I have to either:

1. Trust the versions I am using will stay in the repos, so I just adjust my deploy script to pull specific versions (easy, but high risk of breaking down the line)
2. Tarball every utility I need, including some system defaults (annoying, but I can stash the tarballs with the scripts in our quality system).
3. Argue that we don't inherently need to lock these down and instead just log what software versions we were using at the time (easy technically, hard socially because I have to convince validation and quality engineers this is fine and then I can trigger a random chance boss battle with the FDA).

This is why always updating software has me skeptical, because while option #3 would be completely viable in an ideal world, I have a real need to reproduce the same results whether it be this very moment or in 3-4 years where someone else sitting in my seat has to do it.