hair-pulling frustration

[Terry Judd]

On 12/11/2014 11:00 am, "Dr. Hawkins" <dochawk at gmail.com> wrote:

>LiveCode's developer previews simply execue (nightly snapshot that
>executed), the RC are alpha quality, the 5.5 series are late beta, and the
>6.x and 7.x releases are early beta.

I think that¹s a bit harsh. There are problems with every version but
typically only a very small number effect individual users. Like many
others I move to a newer version when a new feature that I want has been
added or a bug that is holding me back gets fixed. If other problems
emerge then I step back and monitor things for a bit longer. I don¹t
really care how a release is named, alpha, beta, DP or RC - if it does
enough of what I want then I use it.
>
>When or if I come to thinking about buying a commercial version of
>LiveCode
>>I will be in a very odd position, not really knowing whether
>>I am buying a version that is, really, stable, or just something beta-ish
>>labelled 'stable' which will then cause all sorts of unforeseen
>>problems with my product.
>
>
>My attitude would probably be far different if I were using a community
>version . . . I understand the open source and mixed models quite well,
>but
>would be far better off with a fixed and working 5 than what the efforts
>have been spent on the last couple of years.

I guess it depends on what you want the software to do. While things move
relatively slowly in the desktop world, mobile OSes are changing rapidly.
A stable version 5 would be fairly useless to an iOS developer. I like the
fact that LC is evolving - warts and all. If the alternative is what used
to happen with Director (maybe still does), where Œstable¹ versions go
unchanged for years, then I¹ll go for the LC model every time.

Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree that it is annoying when you
regularly butt up against bugs - old and new - and it would be good to get
some useful info on these in an accessible and easily digestible format -
that is, other than via the release notes and the bug database. Perhaps if
these could be aggregated in some way and added as a Œknown issues¹ item
to LC¹s help menu it would be easier for us to decide which version of LC
to use and when to make the switch. The identification/verification of
major new issues against a version (or multiple versions) or fixes in
newly released versions could also perhaps appear as notifications in LC's
start centre.

Terry...