Jim, Perhaps the upload sequence needs to have some additional safety, i.e., query target radio and compare/match some ident string on candidate image - and fail upload if they match - of course with an informative message (link to kb article, etc).

I think in general certain radio drivers should always do this as we have had this problem before (different radio images with similar/same radio models).

Does anyone know if oem software does this? I think I recall seeing that the oem software only queries and stores certain portions of the radio image (not special blocks) - while certain functions that interact with special block are done in sort of a real-time fashion.

On Dec 30, 2014, at 4:16 PM, Jim Unroe rock.unroe@gmail.com wrote:

Almost daily someone has to be instructed how to recover their radio after they uploaded a CHIRP image saved from a radio with BFB/BFS firmware into a new radio with N5R firmware. I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out how they are doing this. The daily builds blocks an image that is incompatible with the radio to be uploaded.

I just confirmed that uploaded a BFS311 image into an N5R-20 radio that the single backport patch to CHIRP v0.4.1 isn't enough to keep CHIRP from uploading incompatible images.

I keep telling everyone to not use the CHIRP stable version for all Baofeng/Pofung radios (except for the UV-B5/UV-B6) but most don't find out until it is too late. And there are some that don't want to run anything but a stable release.

The October date on the stable build is misleading. It contains nothing since the April v0.4.0 build except the backported patch that apparently isn't dong the job.

I'm thinking that there either needs to be more patches backported to the stable build (not recommended by me) or roll out a v0.4.2 that is current with the latest daily build. If not either of these two things, then maybe a strong warning on the downloads page not to use the v0.4.1 stable build for Baofeng/Pofung radios.

Any other ideas?

Jim KC9HI _______________________________________________ chirp_devel mailing list chirp_devel@intrepid.danplanet.com http://intrepid.danplanet.com/mailman/listinfo/chirp_devel Developer docs: http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Developers

I keep telling everyone to not use the CHIRP stable version for all Baofeng/Pofung radios (except for the UV-B5/UV-B6) but most don't find out until it is too late. And there are some that don't want to run anything but a stable release.

The October date on the stable build is misleading. It contains nothing since the April v0.4.0 build except the backported patch that apparently isn't dong the job.

I'm thinking that there either needs to be more patches backported to the stable build (not recommended by me) or roll out a v0.4.2 that is current with the latest daily build.

That would technically be 0.5.0 based on our previous release criteria.

If not either of these two things, then maybe a strong warning on the downloads page not to use the v0.4.1 stable build for Baofeng/Pofung radios.

Any other ideas?

Yeah, how about we drop the "stable" releases entirely and start having people just download the latest *build*? Given that we run tests on every build, don't publish if they fail, and generally don't develop in a break-n-fix mode, there's really zero reason (AFAICT) to ever run the stable builds.

I would propose that we just adjust the download page to describe how and when builds are generated, and then link to the latest build for the actual download links. This should result in more people running more current stuff in general.

Thoughts?

--Dan