I’ve had my Mark II since late October.
Very shortly after receiving it, I selected the “Beta” channel and enabled “Automatic updates” via the device settings webpage, in an attempt to get some of the functionality (skills, sensible shutdown, acceptance of modern-length SSH keys, etc) that should have been present.
Since then, after several reboots, the device continues to show that it’s running version 21.1.2.
There hasn’t been any notification of any software updates pushed to the device, and no improvement to the limited functionality, and no response to my Github issue (Mycroft 2: mycroft-msm not installed · Issue #95 · MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-II · GitHub) asking for info about differences between the “Stable” and “Beta” releases.
The improved documentation for Dinkum now has a “Software” page that has valid links (Mycroft Software - Mycroft Mark II) – yeah!. However, those links are each to a single binary image, not to a github repo, a page that includes basic information such as a changelog, a digital signature and checksum of the downloadable image, etc. In short, there’s no way for paying customers to have any information about the release cycle, the changes from one version to another, to fully trust the software, or to have a way to revert to a previous version.
It is disconcerting that the Dinkum Github repo (GitHub - MycroftAI/mycroft-dinkum: A consumer ready version of Mycroft specifically for the Mark II.) (1) shows so little activity and (2) has no tagged versions that correspond to the names of the stable or beta ‘releases’. This makes it difficult for users to know the provenance of the software they are running and difficult to contribute to the community.
Furthermore, looking through the partitions in the beta image (something that end users should not have to do) shows a complete lack of any easily visible version number, release name, README, etc. The Beta “release” seems to have been created on Oct 13 02:24, which suggests that there hasn’t been any significant software development since the initial shipment of Mycroft II hardware.
Is the dinkum “Beta” channel (and, by implication, the software stack as a whole) dead?