Next ifort update will be a full download

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I wanted to give people here a "heads up" - the next update for Intel Visual Fortran, 8.0.050, will be a full download, requiring an uninstall of the old version and installing the new, rather than a patch. A problem with the patch install process was not discovered in time and, due to the large number of kits for various products we produce, there wasn't time to fix the problem for this update.

We expect that future updates will again be patches. We apologize for the inconvenience.

[jkrob]

Steve,

Haven't they all been full downloads?? The last notification I received was for w_fc_pc_8.0.047.exe back on March 27. Every notification I have received was through https://premier.intel.com and every download from them required an uninstall of the previous version. I have yet to see only a "patch update" to IVF the way CVF did it. With CVF it was so much simpler...go to a public web site & download the patch. No logging into a secure web site & having to remember a user name with a complex password.

Speaking of https://premier.intel.com, I can't get on this morning...is the site down?

Thanks,
Jeff

[Jugoslav_Dujic]

(I'm not Steve, but I felt like adding few comments of my own :-) )

There is also .048, which was a patch (not very small either, around 50 MB). Unfortunately, I haven't received the notification via e-mail premier subscription either -- i heard it through the grapewine :-) -- namely, Steve's announcement on this Forum.

I share your opinion about inconvenience of Premier mechanisms -- its overparanoic security seems to be the most hated feature around.

I don't have problems logging to Premier (having seen your post).

Regarding updates, I think that frequent issuing of new IVF releases is a Good Thing compared with CVF. (If I were cynical, I'd say that it's because CVF had never had that many bugs at any stage of development >:) ). Still, I'd like to see a "Revision History" page somewhere in the documentation, where one could see what bugs are fixed/features added. I don't see anything similar in Release Notes (nor a link therein) -- am I missing it?

Jugoslav

[Steven_L_Intel1]

There is a separate document available through Premier Support accompanying each release a "README.TXT" which lists issue numbers and titles of bugs fixed in that update.

Jugoslav, you should be receiving notices - please check that your contact info is correct (though what I can see of it looks right.) If you don't get a notice of 8.0.050 (it's not out yet), send me mail and I'll have it looked into.

...

I'm torn on the frequent updates thing. It's not necessarily that there are a lot more bugs than there were in CVF - while there certainly were a lot to begin with, it has settled down quite a bit in the past few months. Intel's traditional compiler market has been a relative few, "big accounts", where the customers want fixes NOW (if not yesterday), and are used to frequent upgrade cycles. But as Intel has expanded into the more general market, there are a lot of customers who don't like frequent notifications of updates, because they feel they have to install them all. There's also the general perception that frequent updates means lots of bugs. We COULD have issued updates for CVF every month, but didn't feel it necessary.

With CVF, we basically had a single person (me) packaging the updates (another single engineer built the installable kits.) But there was also only one product, really, and we did 3-4 updates a year at most. Intel has a lot more combinations of products and platforms (just the C++ and Fortran compilers alone are eight combinations, soon to be twelve!) There is an install engineering team and a product validation team, and their work is tightly scheduled with so many releases. One could argue (and I have) that less frequent releases would feel more stable and would give us some breathing room, but old habits die hard...

I expect that something is going to have to give in this process, but I have no idea when that might be.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Ok, 8.0.050 is now out and the e-mails have been sent...