This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

[Mark Wieder]

On 09/09/2015 01:10 AM, Mark Waddingham wrote:

> I think you should perhaps look at the title of your post for an example
> of passive-aggressiveness, rather than Ali's perfectly measured and
> appropriate response to your pull request :)

<g>

> In regards to binary stackfile contributions - I'm sorry but we simply
> cannot accept them at this time. I think the community would be rather
> unhappy if we did accept a binary stackfile contribution in which
> someone had planted something nefarious that we did not see and ended up
> adversely affecting their local systems on install in some heinous way.

Yes. This has been one of the main problems with that monolithic stack 
structure from the very beginning. (Don't tell Kevin I mentioned *that* 
word)

> Now, I'm not saying there is not a solution to this - but we don't have
> one right now. How far off is a solution? I honestly don't know.
>
> So, it seems to me, the best solution *right now* is that we all work on
> the develop branch and therefore LC8. The develop branch IDE has a
> substantial number of script only stacks which makes contribution (and
> also in house changes - I should add!) a lot lot easier and more
> transparent *and* it is only one branch to focus on so if a binary
> change is required, a LiveCode engineer only has to go through and do
> the necessary work once (which, I'd point out Ali quite happily did with
> the contribution in question).

Well, I'm not going to try to manage the project for you. You all are in 
a much better position to decide what's best for us. I will say, though, 
that it's more than a bit frustrating that two and half years after the 
initial open source release there's still no mechanism in place for 
accepting arbitrary IDE stack changes. I would have thought that more 
resources devoted to scriptifying more of the IDE stacks would result in 
offloading tasks from the internal team, get more long-standing bugs 
fixed, and ease the process of adding new features.

As an aside, I believe Monte's lcvcs system involves a binary diff 
mechanism for comparing two stacks.

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com