hair-pulling frustration

[Richmond]

On 11/11/14 21:25, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
> 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.

Dear Dr Hawkins,

I hope RunRev listen to you: they certainly have shown little or no sign 
of listening
when I have stated similar reservations about "Stable" releases.

As a Mac PPC "loony" the fact that the 'last' Mac PPC compatible version 
(6.6.5) doesn't have an
icon that shows up is, frankly, pathetic, and easily resolved . . . but 
it hasn't been.

And that, as they say, is the smallest of all the "bi*ches" there are 
right across the stable releases.

The problem of Unicode fonts being substituted for on past XP Windows 
shows no sign of being resolved, despite
Microsoft having pumped out "Vista", "7", "8" and "*.1" since then.

Boom, boom, and so it goes . . .

Richmond.