[Interest] the path forward - that 7 year thing - was willy-nilly

[Hamish Moffatt]

On 26/3/21 6:38 am, Roland Hughes wrote:
> According to the FDA fact sheet.
>
> https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/fact-sheet-fda-glance
>
> There are currently 25,864 registered FDA medical device facilities. 
> Not one of them can change a single approved process without going 
> through the FDA approval process for said change. That is __NOT__ a 
> sprint nor is it cheap. Within the past 18 months a drug manufacturer 
> in high priced California put out a cattle call for a PDP 11/44 (might 
> have been 24) system manager. Those machines were last made around 
> 1978. There is a group of them still making necessary drugs in California.
>
> Once something is in place it stays there because it is incredibly 
> expensive to replace.
>
>> Qt's horizon is about 7 years.
> That's 8 years too short. 
>> Anything coded to Qt 3.x needs to ported first to 4.8, before going to 5.0.
>> Once you're in the 5.x series, port to 5.15 and fix the warnings. Once you're
>> clean in a working build, port to Qt 6.
>
> There is no one who went to a good school for their IT degree where 
> they made the person take Cost Accounting ever going to utter that as 
> a valid path forward.
>
> There is no MBA, even from a shit school like Keller, that is going to 
> sign off on such a project.
>

I really don't understand your arguments Roland. You say you need Qt 
support for 15 years, but you can't actually change one bit of your 
software without FDA approval, so presumably this means you aren't 
upgrading Qt anyway. Then after 15 years you want to work on a new model 
of the device, starting with your existing code, and you expect it to 
compile with the latest Qt unchanged?


Someone else was talking about support for RHEL 6. Why do you expect to 
use the latest Qt with an ancient OS? Is it reasonable to expect to use 
new Qt with an ancient OS?

I see that the latest Microsoft Visual C++ compiler toolset (v142) 
doesn't support building for Windows XP. You can still use an older 
compiler. That seems like a reasonable compromise.



Hamish