The currently release version is 3.9-0 and it was released Thu May 3 14:31:47 2012 -0700 It has security features like support for various methods of connecting to the network without running as root and performance features like improved CPU Idle detection on the vax emulator and floating point on the pdp-11. The current Beta of version 4.0 may also be a reasonable update.
This issue is still current; I just wanted to add that SIMH has also published bug fixes for 3.9-0 on their website: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/interim/ Supposedly, these include "important fixes for the VAX780, PDP-11, and 1401". It may be worth to include those in an update to 3.9. The most recent file on there is from 2014, however. The same goes for beta releases on GitHub. I'm unsure of the versioning policy that SIMH follows; maybe it is worth considering picking a specific git commit for the time being and stabilizing that.
I have been working on an update for some time. As you found out, 3.9 is obsolete already and the development has moved to GitHub. The current upstream maintainers are not interested in making releases so I will have to package git snapshots. SIMH being a collection of lots of different simulators with often different licenses, not to mention plenty of embedded (non-free or completely unclear licensed) firmware, it takes a lot of time to get right while I am also working on other complex packages. For that matter I have already packaged simtools (still in experimental), which are all the tools that were split out of SIMH upstream into their own repository.
On Sat, 6 Jan 2018 19:06:42 +0100 Andreas Bombe <aeb@debian.org> wrote: ... I'm fully aware of this situation and started an issue in the simh github project, see https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/734 Even though the key simh maintainer is quite reluctant to introduce a reasonable release scheme (which would also have other key advantages) I'd be willing to spend some time and energy to set this up for simh. Having read this I wonder however whether there are other show stoppers around. I'd very much appreciate if Andreas gives a hint on whether the missing release scheme is the key issue (that's where I could contribute) or whether other issues have to be resolved first.
Hi Andreas! The packaged SIMH version is quite old, doesn't contain relevant ROM dumps and lacks the tools (still in experimental.) For my own use, I've packaged SIMH (from git) and simtools to resemble at least a structured way to install/deinstall SIMH and its stuff. I'm not sure about other people's expectation on Debian's SIMH package, though my own is to have a recent version and all ROM dumps in a useful state. Would it be a way to split up the package (or move it altogether) to non-free? And possibly just live with GIT snapshots? Updating the package as new simulators show up shouldn't be too much of work. Maybe a quite simple approach could be to just put everything in ./BIN/ together, as well as all .bin and .lda files (and probably all the stuff that resemble machine check programs) to a separate ROM package? Another route could be to actually split up the SIMH Debian package into individual simulators, with SIMH package depending on all of them. Though I'm not a Debian Maintainer myself, I'd like to get recent stuff into the distro and would like to volunteer if that would be helpful. Thanks, Jan-Benedict
Hi, as per bug #1010998 the lastest upstream version is not DFSG free any more. The license file with the non-free section does not exist in this release https://github.com/simh/simh/releases/tag/v3.11-1 but it should be verified that the problematic text is not specified in single files. The upstream issue which has lead to the problematic LICENSE.txt file https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1028 is talking about just summarising licenses of single files. So inspecting the code would be needed as well. Maybe its safer to follow the hint in this issue https://github.com/simh/simh/issues/1163 and rather package the free fork at https://github.com/open-simh/simh/ Kind regards Andreas.