Re: 4.0 vs 3.8 again

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 11/19/2013 12:37 PM, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:
> On 11/19/2013 11:58 AM, c. wrote:
> > On 19 Nov 2013, at 17:11, c.<address@hidden>  wrote:
> >
> > > >  the main reason is that, although the GUI is a huge difference it is
> > > >  still terribly buggy, at least on OSX where I am testing, I'd prefer
> > > >  a new major release to be more stable.
> > BTW, although I'm mostly looking at the GUI because, as you say,
> > that is a HUGE new feature, problems on OSX 10.9 are not only there,
> > I still see ~15 test failures in 'make check'.
> >
> > c.
> Is it worth considering a 3.8 release without the GUI, and a 4.0 release
> with
> GUI when the GUI is definitely suitable for general use on all platforms?
> This may satisfy the differing views about 3.8 and 4.0 and avoid releasing
> a buggy GUI.

This is an idea worth considering.  Make the 3.8 version with the GUI 
off by default but still available with "--with-gui" or something.

I've been inclined to think 3.8, but I could be convinced to go with 4.0 
based upon how much has changed, how long this has taken and how long it 
will be before a follow-up release comes.  I think a followup release 
will be a while off, because there are fundamental things that will need 
to be changed in order to allow advancing.  Those would include: a more 
flexible method than callbacks (thereby allowing more developers to 
help), a means to transfer command results to the GUI (some is done 
there) for advanced features, and what is turning out to be interrupt 
issues.  Spending more time with those types of things to get a good 
footing would help in the long run.

I feel the actual GUI portion of things has been pretty good, and some 
people have put a lot of effort into making bugs easily fixed, changes 
flexible, etc.  It is the underlying system-dependent issues that remain.

Dan