Nope, I have a 10.7.5 laptop and it works for me there.
I didn’t mean that it was caused by 10.7.5, I meant the particular eccentricities of my computer. I can get to the Standard Rules by Showing Package Contents on the application and hunting through the multiple layers of stuff that you need to in order to find the built-in extensions, but it would be nice to have some suggestion about the sort of thing that could be going wrong that’s keeping the menu from displaying the extensions the way it’s supposed to.
The version number of the Standard Rules isn’t updated either, BTW; it’s still “3/120430.” (I’ve checked that I’m looking at the correct extension–it has the “multiple action processing” rules in it.)
Yes, that version number is often not updated in a release. I once asked Graham about this but honestly I forget what he said. (Helpful, me.)
So how long will it be before a workable version of 6M62 is available for Macs running 10.6.8? I can see on the bugfix site ( inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1807 ) that this has been marked as fixed, but it still doesn’t actually function on my machine.
You’d have to ask the Mac maintainer that.
How does one get in touch with Toby?
Just trying to understand the I7 release cycle here. The downloadable version of 6M62 (inform7.com/download/) remains the build of 2015-12-24 11:51:49 which lacks any of the bug fixes supposedly since applied. Does this mean that these bug fixes will only be part of a new major release – which will almost certainly have its own set of new bugs due to whatever new features have been added? At what point is a “bug fixed build” ever to be released then?
I recognize that it’s considered ungracious here to ask such questions about free software, but really it’s hard to have much enthusiasm for I7 authoring when the released builds have showstopper bugs that never get fixed until new showstopper bugs are added in a new release and the cycle continues. I for one would welcome a rethinking of this strategy by the developers. If they are too busy with other work to handle releases in a timely fashion, then they should strongly consider changing I7 to a standard open source project where others can do the work for them. My $0.02 anyway.
I will not get into ought-tos because I’m not in charge. But you are correct on the current facts: there is a single-stream release process with no in-between bug-fix-only releases. Some releases have more “major features” than others, however.
But I remember the previous release having had a bug-fix only release soon after the official release (it’s too early in the morning for me to rewrite that sentence properly). Was that because it had a particulaly nasty bug somewhere?
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.
I can’t see why that would ever change.
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. 
Also:
https://intfiction.org/t/if-archive-hugo-downloads/59/1
inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1808
“Resolved” only in the minds of the developers but not in the IDEs of the users.
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.
Agreed on all counts.
I’ve asked Graham about this. He says
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?