I’m still using Inform 6G60 and it suits me just fine. 6L02 broke my work in progress quite thoroughly and I couldn’t seem to get it working afterwards, so I never bothered with 6L38 and 6M62.
I initially upgraded to 6L02 because it was the newest version and I didn’t see any point in sticking with the old one when something new was available, but after all the problems I ran into with 6L02 I couldn’t wait to get back to the old version. Sure, it might lack the added features of the new version but then, realistically, am I ever going to take advantage of those new features? 6G60 does what I need and until such time as it doesn’t - until I literally can’t write my games the way I want with it - I’ll be sticking with it.
Which is a kind of rambling way of saying: until such time as new versions come out that are as bug free as is humanely possible, and which don’t break current works in progress and require significant workarounds to fix, then future upgrades hold zero appeal to me. I don’t want to have to learn new ways of doing things every time a new version comes out. An upgrade should be just that - something better than what we’re already using, not something which we have to figure out how to use all over again.
Users having to stick with old versions because the new ones don’t work indicates a platform in eclipse, seems to me. At least projects compiled with old versions of I7 still run in the 'terps, so there’s no necessary reason to use more recent versions – and so I guess people like me have no right to complain. Still, it deflates enthusiasm for I7 and makes it more sensible to look at other platforms. Too bad, really.
Yes, Inform 6L02 was released in May 2014 and Inform 6L38 was released in August 2014. Versions 6E59, 6E72, 6F95, and 6G60 were all released rapidly between June-Dec. 2010; I think at least one of those was mostly a bug fix.
Which 6L38 errors are you concerned with that have been marked corrected but aren’t corrected in a release yet? I’ve been looking at the bug tracker and it doesn’t seem like there are that many, or not showstoppers; the big one was where Flexible Survival (a mammoth project) was choking but it looks as though they were able to resolve that. Not many such errors in the core Inform.
All the versions release the same kind of file type so there shouldn’t be much of an issue about releases from old versions refusing to run in updated interpreters… insofar as the interpreters ever get updated.
I might as well pop in and say that 6M62 is completely broken for non-English projects (the infamous parse tree broken error). Anyway, that bug hasn’t been corrected yet according to Mantis, I just wanted to mention it. Because I’m really waiting for a fix.
I’m still running 6L38 because 6M62 crashes on startup on my platform. Mantis shows the issue as fixed, but the fix hasn’t shipped yet.
I realize that the overall impact of a bug is a weighted product of severity * frequency over the entire userbase, and not many people are still running Snow Leopard. For me individually, though, severity is critical and frequency is always. It would have been nice to have seen a bugfix release as soon as that fix went in.
The situation also has addon effects like my withholding bug reports because I can’t repro a bug on the latest release because I can’t run the latest release.
April 30th is just around the corner, though, so fingers crossed.
a) the fix exists;
b) the version in the Mac app store may already reflect that fix (he didn’t have time to check when we had this conversation);
c) he will try to verify this shortly and also post the new version on the main site. I have set a reminder for myself to check with him about this.
More generally: Graham is still working on Inform regularly, and still with the long-term aim of releasing the source. To the extent that there’s been a shift of team behavior, it’s more on me. I no longer closely monitor Inform conversation on this board, and therefore am seldom in a position to escalate urgent concerns, or to explain what’s currently going on.
I would be sad to think that that was significantly hindering people, but I do not realistically expect to go back to performing that function in general for the foreseeable future. Demands on my time have changed, as has my sense of how I can most effectively support IF development in general, and even when I was in that role, I’m not sure it was providing enough advantage to board users.
Ok, then that gives us a very significant piece of information and possibility - since the mantis bug-tracker thing seems not to be fulfilling people’s expectations and being misleading, and if you can’t be the go-between any more, who COULD be?
If all that it takes is a dedicated someone, an individual, who comes here and takes the pulse of the active usage of I7 and can come back to you and say “The state of this, this and this bug/feature is actively crippling users who have elected not to migrate to the newest version yet”…
Of course, this is only one half of the issue. You also took the time to explain things. What if you only had to explain it once, to a single person, and you could explain a lot of things at once, and these were relayed back here?
If it were a thing where I was answering this person’s email once every couple weeks or so, then that’s probably doable. If it were more frequent, I’m not sure whether I would do a great job keeping up with that.
Every couple of weeks? I’m thinking once every 3 weeks or once a month. Surely that would be enough to collate all the information necessary to go between.
I’d be willing to, since I come here every day. I’m not an active I7 user, though, so maybe someone else would be more appropriate. I mean, if all that’s necessary is read the threads here and note what bugs people are finding critical and send it to you and publish your responses in a dedicated thread once a month… even I can do that.
Thanks for the update. Please convey my thanks and appreciation to Graham also.
I think that this would help. It adds a link to the Emily->Graham communication chain and could make it a bit of a game of telephone, but I think that filtering and pushing info to Emily in a regular Inform Issues email (with links to specific posts) would keep her in the loop and allow her to efficiently gather details directly from the forums as needed.
Your lack of active I7 use ought not to be an issue so long as you can recognize when people are discussing a problem, even if you don’t understand the details. You could always ask for help from more knowledgeable people when you’re at a loss. I suspect that you could err on the side of overreporting issues and still save Emily a lot of time.
Well, I suppose silence from everyone gives consent, and consent from vlaviano gives consent. I’ll take a look at the threads from March and this here here thread as well and start the ball rolling.
Thanks, Emily. I installed the new release, and I can confirm that I’m no longer seeing 1807 (the crash on startup) or 1815 (an issue with indented headings). However, I am seeing 1808 (grey bar floating around the workspace as the window is resized) on 10.6.8.
I created a Mantis account, but it’s not clear to me how to add a note to an existing issue.
The MacIDE issues being mostly resolved is excellent, though if someone could help vlaviano update Mantis it’d be even better.
As for the issue of non-English games being totally broken, which I can concur to ocasionally seeing mentions of in non-English communities and it’s natural for it to be a HUGE problem there and non-existent here, Emily said
I’ve seen you since posting things like this - are they in response to the first of your monthly emails?
I’d find it informative to be able to see your summary of outstanding issues, what would you think about posting the email you send here in the forum? (Minus any sensitive issues, if there are any.)
