Pay to upgrade.. again?

I see that to get the latest Homegate software, I need to purchase it... again. This time with a hardware dongle, good idea... it stops me running it on multiple PC's at the same time.
I just hope that future upgrades of other Clipsal software, like Toolkit/C-Gate will not break my existing V3.9 Homegate.
This has happened before with an upgrade of Toolkit/C-Gate which then screwed up Homegate. I had two choices, downgrade Toolkit or buy a new Homegate.
I see by the software compatability table that v3.9.0/v3.9.1 Homegate is compatible with v1.6.0/v1.6.1 Toolkit. Will downloading and installing new versions of Toolkit break my existing Homegate? I want to know before I do it this time...
Regards,
Michael.

 

Hi Michael,

One of the last things I worked on at Clipsal before leaving was breaking the tight relationship between C-Gate versions and all the Clipsal built C-Gate client applications (S+/HG/Piced/Circa/Marpa/Piced) versions. Although I can't say that a future version of C-Gate will always be backwards compatiable, unlike earlier releases, compatibility will be last a lot longer. So there should be no need now, or in the forseeable future, to have to upgrade HomeGate/Schedule Plus due to installing the latest C-Gate/Toolkit.

At some point the ability to maintain backwards compatibility will have to be broken, but at the time Clipsal was hoping this will be the exception rather than the norm, and also be a long way off from happening.

Previously to ensure a 100% compatibility client software checked the major and minor versions of C-Gate and if either had changed would refuse to connect. Now the clients actually issue commands to check the individual parts of C-Gate they use to see if they are still compatible. So if a change in unit programming is made, only Toolkit needs to be upgraded as it is the only client that uses unit programming functionality.

The intent was to specifically avoid 2 issues that were showing up in the field.

A) People being forced to upgrade their paid for software due to having to use newer version of C-Gate for newer units being installed on a project.

B) Clipsal having to simultaneously release new versions of all software products at once when C-Gate was updated.

 

Cool, good to know. Thanks guys.
Michael.