Development versions

Development versions

[Peter Stephenson]

Two points:

1.  I meant to mention this yesterday, sorry:  difficulties some people are
having with getting the latest version seem to be due to wget, as Tanaka
Akira noted with supanet; from a message from Bart, it seems that the same
problem (wget is adding a port number which the server doesn't expect) is
happening at freeserve.  Presumably this is because they are using a server
provided by you-know-who.

2.  Geoff just asked me why I didn't send the latest version to the main
archive in a special directory.  The real answer is that I was worried
about extra traffic due to mirroring versions which are only going to be
there a week or two.  But if enough people are using them anyway --- or if
even more people would use them if they found them on the official mirrors
--- maybe this isn't a problem.  I could (as Richard used to do) make the
directory unbrowsable, so you could only retrieve the file if it was there,
but this would mean everyone getting the file from Australia, although
that's not much of a difficulty nowadays.  Maybe other people have strong
views.  The only real difficulty might be that I don't know what my ISP
would do with the 2MB mail files the current procedure would need, but I
imagine with people sending their MPEG home videos to relatives in
Venezuela that's not a problem either.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk>

Re: Development versions

[Clint Adams]

> even more people would use them if they found them on the official mirrors
> --- maybe this isn't a problem.  I could (as Richard used to do) make the
> directory unbrowsable, so you could only retrieve the file if it was there,
> but this would mean everyone getting the file from Australia, although
> that's not much of a difficulty nowadays.  Maybe other people have strong

Whichever way is fine, as long as I can get it; wget not working is
a minor annoyance, but lynx will still get the file.

But seeing how often people are referred to a "pws" interim release
on the grounds that it is less buggy and more featureful than 3.1.6
makes me wonder if the "point" releases are too infrequent.  It is
the unstable/development tree, after all.

Re: Development versions

[Peter Stephenson]

Clint Adams wrote:
> But seeing how often people are referred to a "pws" interim release
> on the grounds that it is less buggy and more featureful than 3.1.6
> makes me wonder if the "point" releases are too infrequent.  It is
> the unstable/development tree, after all.

The trouble is syntactical stability.  As things have been, you'd have to
alter your completion stuff completely with each release, which I think is
a bit much even for a beta release.  But now that's got more stable, we
should certainly go for 3.1.7 early in the new year.  I style have to fix
typeset, traps and compinstall.  Grmp.

I'll try to send 3.1.6-pws-12 to the main archive later today, it might get
the development versions a bit more exposure.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk>