This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

[Ali Lloyd]

> 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.

We're in total agreement here. Unfortunately I did it prior to moving the
IDE to GitHub, so I can't give a link to prove how massive the task of
extracting all the scripts and custom properties from the revLibrary stack
and moving them to script-only stacks was (indeed it was doing this that
made it worthwhile moving the IDE to GitHub in the first place). Obviously
actually moving the code is trivial, but updating the references elsewhere
in the IDE, making it work with the standalone builder, and finding a new
home for the data stored in custom properties is not at all.

As much as possible of this was done in 6.7, but it did cause a number of
regressions, especially with standalone building - this is part of the
reason there have been so many releases since 6.7.4, when this took place.
But it has been worthwhile - even though we haven't yet had many community
contributions, there have been a great deal of benefits to our workflow,
and it has made it much easier for us to fix bugs in those stacks.

Scriptifying the IDE's palettes is a slightly different task, and one which
we haven't been pursuing for its own sake. But since the 8.0 IDE
necessitated many changes, we have made a point of scriptifying any palette
in which major changes were made. Hence the scriptified menubar, tools
palette, property inspector, script editor behaviors and dictionary. We
felt more comfortable making these changes in the 8.0 DP cycle than rocking
the boat in 6 / 7.

Having said that, it is worth noting that the engine in LC 8 is essentially
stable. The only real difference between it and the LC 7 engine is LiveCode
Builder, which is more of an addition than a change. The main reason 8 is
still DP is because of the changes to the IDE, and a stack without widgets
should behave exactly the same in 8 as in 7.


On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 7:23 AM Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 09/10/2015 04:28 AM, Mark Wieder wrote:
> > On 09/09/2015 12:06 AM, Ali Lloyd wrote:
> >
> >> I'm sorry you felt it was passive-aggressively not accepted. It was
> >> meant
> >> neither as passive-agressively <anything>, nor <anything> not accepted.
> >
> > Well, that was intended to be a flippant remark, the the posting
> > subject should have reinforced that.
> > Seems like I struck a nerve.
> > I was referring to the fact that my pull request wasn't rejected, but
> > it also was placed in a we're-not-going-to-accept-this category.
> > See my further comments to Mark's post, but otherwise my apology for
> > the unintended slight.
> >
>
> Mark, "*flippant*" remarks often seem to hit nerves over at the
> mother-ship, lest you haven't noticed.
>
> We could open a whole new thread about *intentionality* here . . .
>
> Richmond.
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