Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
[ EDIT: Jimmy points out below that ETC *has* built Nomad 2.9.2 for OS/X 64-bit, which means that about 2/3 of this post are no longer an issue... mostly. ]
I have -- I think I have -- a policy disagreement with the EOS department at ETC, and I'd like some eyeballs on it, to tells me which of us is crazy.
I have, in my theatre, 2 or maybe 3 Macs running pre-Catalina OS/X. One of our instructors, the Stagecraft adjunct, has an MBP running Big Sur. He has a license for Nomad.
We have 2 Ion's: a new one running 3.0.3, and an older one (on XPe) running 2.8.3.
He would like, understandably, to be able to tech in a show on his MacBook (in the theatre with the 2.8 board), and he's even willing (if absolutely necessary) to play around with which version of Nomad is installed at any given moment -- since the Nomad and console versions of EOS must, tech support tells me, match exactly down to the point release.
And that leads us to two places:
1) They tell me that the 3.0 Nomad he has installed *will not, full stop* mirror[edit: probably not 'mirror'; see comments] a 2.9(.0) Ion. And yet, he did it all last week; wrote 200 cues remotely from his laptop on the deck at American Stage, whose 2.9.0 is also the older XPe board, to the best of my knowledge and belief.
And why did he have to use the 3.x version of Nomad?
2) ETC Tech Support says that it is a policy decision that they *will not* compile older versions of Nomad for newer versions of OS/X -- which *will not run 32-bit binaries at all*. (If you use Macs, you may have already learned about this, possibly, the hard way). Because of that, 3.0 is the oldest Nomad you can run on Macs which have been upgraded to Catalina or newer; older Nomad programs are 32-bit and won't run on newer OS/Xen.
Our two MacMinis will not be upgrading to Catalina at all, as we have quite a number of older packages that are abandonware, but which still work perfectly and either we do not have the budget to replace them, or we simply cannot, and so we cannot use them to mirror our 2.8.3 Ion, as much as I'd like to.
We *can* mirror our 3.0, but we're not rolling that back to 2.9.2 just for compatibility for others -- I know that's a non-starter and I'm not even going to ask -- and it's also apparently impossible to install multiple versions of Nomad simultaneously on the same machine.
I'm not sure it would work to ask ETC to fix the latter problem, but I have been both a producer of software and a professional user/supporter of it for close to 4 decades, and I don't at all think it's unreasonable to ask ETC to compile the older pre-3.0 versions of Nomad in 64-bit for the 64-bit-only OS's.
Most of that was background I thought necessary; the question at the end is the only thing I really want an answer to (though I'm happy to hear opinions on all the side topics)...
I have -- I think I have -- a policy disagreement with the EOS department at ETC, and I'd like some eyeballs on it, to tells me which of us is crazy.
I have, in my theatre, 2 or maybe 3 Macs running pre-Catalina OS/X. One of our instructors, the Stagecraft adjunct, has an MBP running Big Sur. He has a license for Nomad.
We have 2 Ion's: a new one running 3.0.3, and an older one (on XPe) running 2.8.3.
He would like, understandably, to be able to tech in a show on his MacBook (in the theatre with the 2.8 board), and he's even willing (if absolutely necessary) to play around with which version of Nomad is installed at any given moment -- since the Nomad and console versions of EOS must, tech support tells me, match exactly down to the point release.
And that leads us to two places:
1) They tell me that the 3.0 Nomad he has installed *will not, full stop* mirror[edit: probably not 'mirror'; see comments] a 2.9(.0) Ion. And yet, he did it all last week; wrote 200 cues remotely from his laptop on the deck at American Stage, whose 2.9.0 is also the older XPe board, to the best of my knowledge and belief.
And why did he have to use the 3.x version of Nomad?
2) ETC Tech Support says that it is a policy decision that they *will not* compile older versions of Nomad for newer versions of OS/X -- which *will not run 32-bit binaries at all*. (If you use Macs, you may have already learned about this, possibly, the hard way). Because of that, 3.0 is the oldest Nomad you can run on Macs which have been upgraded to Catalina or newer; older Nomad programs are 32-bit and won't run on newer OS/Xen.
Our two MacMinis will not be upgrading to Catalina at all, as we have quite a number of older packages that are abandonware, but which still work perfectly and either we do not have the budget to replace them, or we simply cannot, and so we cannot use them to mirror our 2.8.3 Ion, as much as I'd like to.
We *can* mirror our 3.0, but we're not rolling that back to 2.9.2 just for compatibility for others -- I know that's a non-starter and I'm not even going to ask -- and it's also apparently impossible to install multiple versions of Nomad simultaneously on the same machine.
I'm not sure it would work to ask ETC to fix the latter problem, but I have been both a producer of software and a professional user/supporter of it for close to 4 decades, and I don't at all think it's unreasonable to ask ETC to compile the older pre-3.0 versions of Nomad in 64-bit for the 64-bit-only OS's.
Most of that was background I thought necessary; the question at the end is the only thing I really want an answer to (though I'm happy to hear opinions on all the side topics)...
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