hair-pulling frustration

[Dr. Hawkins]

I can't help but wonder what it would take to get runrev to follow normal
practice and actually get something to alpha level before calling it a
"developer preview", beta by a "release candidate" (ok, that still wouldn't
be normal), and working rather than early beta before release.

If I sold something at these stages, I'd be out of business by sundown.

Do the developers even pretend to use the IDE before slapping "release
candidate" on it?  Do they even have some kind of test suite?

The sheer number of pieces of working code that have broken when going from
5.5 to 7.0 is beyond belief, as is the giant step backward in the IDE.

I used to have to kill livecode frequently for the phantom "shadow
variable" problem.  While that happens more often under 6 (which is why I
could never use it) and 7, I now usually have to kill the whole thing
before that happens, as I can't get it to set a breakpoint, or even
acknowedge that I've clicked anything, delays of several seconds, and so
forth.

In addition to the others I've mentioned here an in other recent posts, the
recompile of sqlite is not quite compatible with the old, and behaves
differently.  For example, a semicolon at the end of an entry without
begin/end transaction now causes a parsing error.

Moving forward is one thing, but the only near release grade version is
5.x, which itself isn't quite ready for primetime.

OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that never
should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.
-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462