Gina mentioned in OctoPrint On Air #19 that starting with 1.3.10 OctoPrint will make sure that the tools it uses itself is current enough. As a software developer myself, I think that is a fine thing to do. But... I am not real familiar with the Linux OS. Will running the standard
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade
be all it takes to keep my OS in compliance with OctoPrint? Gina specifically mentioned Python, PIP, and Setup Tools (not sure if I heard the last one correctly). I also don't want to do an update/upgrade and find that I am no longer in compliance because a newer untested version of something has been installed (and thus not be able to run OctoPrint!).
I'm not sure who, other than Gina herself, can answer this, but I look forward to more guidance on this.
What she is/was seeing—if I understand—is that there are people who have OctoPi-imaged installs from a few years ago. So the underlying virtual machine'd python/pip were probably old, I'd guess.
I'm guessing she would like it if people with really old installs get another microSD card, put on a fresh image of OctoPi and then install any plugins necessary. Of course, she's going to try to make this activity easier with a new backup plugin to things.
What @OutsourcedGuru said. The goal here is to detect five year old OctoPi images with equally ancient virtual environments and refuse to automatically update on that. Note that I didn't say "refuse to run on that". So far I haven't even thought about adding an upper limit, so running newer versions won't be an issue.
In any case, an update of the underlying os (mostly) won't touch the virtual environment. That's a bit more involved. Hence the idea is to get people to flash a fresh image every couple of years (preferably also on a fresh card since those things do wear out) and then restore their data on there.
I had some people run into issues recently who were still running OctoPi 0.12 or even older. That's a four or five year old image whose underlying Debian version doesn't even see support anymore. Stuff like that won't fly in the future. Too much testing overhead.