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long term development¶
Often, the lifespan of software tools for a given HW is only a couple of years, after which the manufacturer do not support it any longer, or even remove it from their current/future SW tools.
Either you go with the wave for the latest and the shiniest current thing, or you preserve the SW dev tool such that the same devboard can still be reprogrammed years later.
Best take is to create a Virtual Machine for each hardware platform. Not containers, but a full OS install inside a VM. Then, install in the VM all the dev tools needed, then keep that VM frozen, isolated from Internet and never upgrade it. The update/upgrade frenzy is useless for MCU dev tools. If something must be changed later, then take a VM snapshot first, then put the VM online for a few minutes to install/upgrade, but only if it must.
A VM would still run 10+ years from now, no matter the OS. Disk space is cheap enough to keep one VM for each devboard/MCU family.
