Dear FSL users,
a long-standing feature request has been the possibility to install
multiple FSL major versions using Debian packages. With today's package
update (4.1.6-2) this is now possible.
Noteworthy changes:
- The actual FSL suite is now provided by Debian packages with versioned
names. The current release 4.1 comes in the 'fsl-4.1' package,
subsequent releases will be in 'fsl-4.2' or 'fsl-5.0' packages.
- To make co-installability possible, FSL binaries and configuration are
now installed into version-dependent locations (/usr/lib/fsl/4.1 and
/etc/fsl/4.1). Your old config settings will be automatically moved to
the new location.
- There will still be a 'fsl' package the will ensure smooth upgrades to
the latest FSL release -- nothing special is needed to transition to
the new versioned package -- just update your machines.
- The new 'fsl' (unversioned) package offers another convenience
feature. Symlinks for all FSL binaries are installed into /usr/bin and
allow using the latest FSL version without having to configure your
environment (e.g. by sourcing the config file) before. Obviously, this
will only work for one (the latest) FSL version.
- If you don't need/want/like the convenience functionality of the 'fsl'
package, you can remove it after upgrading (only keeing the fsl-4.1
package). If that is done, it is possible to install any older version
of the FSL Debian packages in parallel to the latest version: e.g.
fsl 3.3 or 4.0 in addition to 4.1.
In this scenario you can decide which FSL version to use, by sourcing
the appropriate config file:
/etc/fsl/MAJOR_VERSION/fsl.sh: for FSL 4.1 and newer
/etc/fsl/fsl.sh: for older releases
As this is a quite signifcant change to the packaging some undiscovered
problems might still be present in this initial release (although we are
locally running this new version for some time now and it seems to
work). If you experience any difficulties while upgrading or running
analyses, please report them here.
In case something is buggy, you can simply reinstall the previous
package version (should still be available in /var/cache/apt/archives/
on every machine). This new release (in comparision to version 4.1.6-1)
only introduces changes to the packaging -- nothing has been changes
regarding the actual FSL suite.
Thanks,
Michael
--
GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de
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