Re: survey on multiple development versions

[Mike Solomon]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 9:08 PM, Colin Campbell <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12/10/2013 06:41 AM, Carl Peterson wrote:

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Mike Solomon <address@hidden> wrote:

Hey all,

I recently e-mailed the development list about multiple concurrent development versions and I’d like to ask users, especially those currently using the development version, to take the time to respond to a question regarding the proposal.

If lilypond.org were to propose multiple development versions (say 5 instead of 1), each offering a different set of experimental features (including the canonical development version), and if lilypond.org offered information on which versions were in need of testing by what types of users, would you be interested in helping out by doing some typesetting with these alternative versions?

The problem I see is an issue of mixing and matching. What if there is a feature I want to use on Development Version A and one I want to use on Development Version B, within the same score? I also foresee a multiplication of the issues regarding who is using what version on this list, as in:

Today:

A: "I have this problem. I am using version 2.17.3"

B: "We fixed this problem in 2.17.23"

With multiple versions:

A: "I have this problem. I am using version 2.19.A.3"

B: "This was fixed on version 2.19.B"

A: "Okay, that fixed that, now I have this problem."

C: "This was fixed on version 2.19.C"

A: "I'm confused. How do I fix both of these problems?"

I'm all for exploring options, but I truly believe this adds a level of complexity we can't handle with existing resources and tools, for relatively small gains or potential loss of live testing of beta-level code.

Cheers,
Colin

Thanks for all the responses - they are very useful.

It sounds like this is a bad idea.

Cheers,

MS