It’s great that Cataclysm is in active development, but it would be nice if the stable builds could get some official bug patches for major bugs which don’t include new material with all their own bugs. As a result of the way things are currently set up, there are no bug-free versions, ever. A single official bug patch roll-up for the most recent stable version would be very helpful, I think.
Fixes for experimental won’t work with stable due to giant difference in code.
Plus, that would be a ton of work to revive the last stable, which is rather outdated at the moment.
Then finally there is the part where last stable has quite a bit of not-exactly-bugs where it isn’t obvious if they’re bugs or just “issues”.
It would be difficult now, for the last stable, but maybe as a plan for the next stable version? At least maybe give people the option of working specifically on the stable solely for patching bugs, with an incremental patch roll-up from time to time.
If people volunteer to do that and keep up, then it could be considered.
But I wouldn’t expect it to happen since it’s hard work and we don’t have many people working even on the current version.
And if no one shows willingness to actually do it, we won’t keep any backwards compatibility “just in case”, since it requires extra effort for something that is unlikely to happen.
I was going to suggest making a ‘testing’ and a ‘current’ version, the current following closely testing (like 1-2 weeks later) if no major problems cropped up, but now that i think of it a bit more, using the current experimentals achieves pretty similar results generally.
But we could use some more promotion on the experimentals, since people usually only look at a project’s lastest stable.
Coolthulu pretty much covered it, something like this requires someone to spend a sometimes very large amount of time backporting fixes from mainline development to the stable branch.
We may be able to do one or two things to make it easier, like labelling bugs with the version where they first appeared, which makes identifying which fixes should be back ported easier.
How about some kind of very simple system for keeping track of which experimentals have crippling bugs, and which ones are more or less fine?
I know that’s pretty much all I’m interested in nowadays, I want to pick up a version with a bunch of new cool stuff in, and then just play that version for a week or so, and go back into hibernation for half a year.
A simple list with all experimentals, upvotes and downvotes, and perhaps a comment function to specify just what kind of horrendous bug monster you were eaten by. Sometimes a bug can be important for some people/play styles, but not others.
The idea would be to list only really bad bugs, like the recent filthy clothing and always automated turrets, which could seriously ruin a game, otherwise it would just be a duplicate of the issue tracker.
Are PRs still being accepted into the 0.C branch?