CorsixTH 0.50 beta 1

[Stephen Baker]

Hello,

I'm in the process of preparing for a first beta / preview of CorsixTH
0.50, to approximately follow our 6 month cadence and to hopefully stir
up some interest. I haven't yet tagged an exact commit, because I think
there might be a few small polish changes to make first.

I'm looking for a couple things:
a) I know that some of you out there are good at writing release notes.
If someone could write a sexier version of what I've drafted that would
be great.
b) If anyone is an expert with NSIS; I would like it to detect if the
Visual Studio 2013 redistributable needs to be installed and if so
download and install it. I know how to do this in WiX, but not NSIS
though I'm sure it's possible.
c) Even though I haven't tagged an exact commit yet, it would be good
for packagers to make sure that they don't have any problem building or
running the latest version, and to sort out what the dependencies are.

I've put all the windows dependencies I expect to use in the deps
project, they are:

SDL2 2.0.3
SDL2_mixer 2.0.0 (I may bump this to the latest Hg version to avoid the
music bug)
Freetype 2.6.0
FFmpeg 2.5.2
Lua 5.3.0
LPeg 0.12.2
LuaFileSystem 1.6.3
LuaSocket 321c0c9b1f (2015-05-03)

[Edvin Linge]

Very good. :-)

I can have a look at release notes this weekend.
It is fairly easy to make NSIS find out whether the package is installed
or not (to check for a registry entry), but to automatically download
and install I don't know.

/Edvin

[Edvin Linge]

I'll rebase my Custom Campaigns pull request to latest, then maybe
someone could look at it to see if it could get into 0.5. :-)

/Edvin

[Joe#]

How long do I have to make an "auto error reports" pull request for 0.50 or is it now too late for even a basic implementation to be included?

[Stephen E. Baker]

I suppose it's about time I commit to a schedule:

Unlike 0.40 I'm not issuing a feature freeze before 0.50 beta 1. Instead
the feature, non-critical bug, and string freeze will happen in
conjunction with the final beta. The only stipulation being that
features introduced during the beta should not bring in new dependencies
or change the build process - our packagers need this time to finalize
their processes.

0.50 beta 1 is planned for this Sunday June 28th
0.50 beta 2 and freeze is planned for Sunday July 12th
Release candidates will be released weekly as long as there is interest
and blockers to fix until the release, hopefully by August.

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[Grimdoc]

That sounds good :)

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[Stephen E. Baker]

As some of you probably noted 0.50 beta 1 was released on Sunday as
planned. So far I haven't heard anything from the porting team. When
Linux or OSX builds are available they can be mailed to me and I'll put
them up.

The windows build is using the dependencies from CorsixTH\deps. The only
major change from the original list is that SDL2_mixer was updated to
the latest hg version.

Stephen E. Baker

[Joe#]

Can tomorrow's feature freeze deadline be extended by a week to provide plenty of time for me or someone else to finish #445 for 0.50?

The sooner a CorsixTH release has this feature, the sooner it can help developers find and fix all of a release's Lua errors.

I'm sorry I've not finished this task before tomorrow's deadline but I would have if not for the problems I've had with compiling CorsixTH in Visual Studio, which may have been caused by a computer hacker. 

If I can't get CorsixTH to compile tomorrow then I won't mind someone else finishing #445 for 0.50. I guess less than 4 hours of work would be required.

If the deadline was extended by a whole week then I or someone else might have enough time to finish #445 and then implement a 0.50 feature for making CorsixTH find Lua error fixing patches, download and then apply them to its scripts. So these two features working together would make 0.50 the most reliable release yet with developers being able to push automatic patches to players for any Lua errors found by the auto reporting feature which wouldn't require source code changes.

[Stephen Baker]

CorsixTH 0.50 beta 2 has been released, which means we are now entering
feature freeze.

From now until the first release candidates in two weeks only pull
requests which fix bugs in CorsixTH or improve the build process should
be merged.

At the request of Joe, pr #445 may also be reviewed and merged if it is
completed in the next week.

Stephen E. Baker

On 2015-06-16 10:08 PM, Stephen Baker wrote:

[Stephen Baker]

On further reflection I think it's too late in the release cycle for this feature to land, though it would be great if it was completed so it could land early in the 0.60 release cycle.

A number of factors lead me to this decision:
* Based on the mockups this feature contains a significant number of new strings which would need to be translated.
* The feature is nuanced and difficult to fully test - there are many types of lua errors - we wouldn't want to make the experience worse for the user under any condition.
* At the moment there are many good error reports in our bug tracker, with full stack traces, which are not being worked on. There have been no consistently active lua developers in the last release period.
* We haven't established what email account errors go to and how that account is managed.
* I haven't seen any code. The link in the issue is not functional.

I look forward to seeing a pull request in the near future so we can have a full 6 months to work out the finer details. I hope this doesn't discourage you.

Stephen E. Baker

[Alberth]

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 7:50:59 PM UTC+2, Joe# wrote:

Can tomorrow's feature freeze deadline be extended by a week to provide plenty of time for me or someone else to finish #445 for 0.50?

The sooner a CorsixTH release has this feature, the sooner it can help developers find and fix all of a release's Lua errors.

Don't worry too much about releases. Just continue working on the feature, and when done, submit a pull request to add it to master. It will get released with the next version. That will give plenty of time to do a few test runs and try-outs to make it work as we want it, rather than squeezing in whatever we have now, and finding that we made a crucial error somewhere two weeks from now, rendering the entire feature useless, and in addition giving us more work when users try to use it, and it fails.
(If you want a feature to be used by users, it has to work properly from day one. If it fails the first time, the damage is done, lots of users will not touch it any more as "last time I tried, it blew up", even if you have fixed it a long time ago.)

Also, until the feature is in, it's not like we are running low on bugs that need fixing :)

Albert

[William Gatens]

Price impact is basically done now, removed setHospital(nil) from the code base in the process when sorting out the new goHome implementation. Just need to squish the commits now which I'll do today or tomorrow and merge if it's not too late for that.

Sadger

[Stephen E. Baker]

Thank you for your work William.

Your price impact change and all other new features will now land in
0.60 rather than 0.50. To echo Alberth's sentiment, a release is just a
snapshot of the project at a point in time for which we've gone to extra
effort to provide stability. The purpose of a feature freeze to a point
where we take a break from the every day effort of adding features in
order to focus on ensuring the best possible experience with what we
have. In my experience, the features which push the boundaries of those
deadlines invariably end up being the source of the most complaints
following release.

Stephen E. Baker

On 2015-07-13 2:26 AM, William Gatens wrote:
>
> Price impact is basically done now, removed setHospital(nil) from the
> code base in the process when sorting out the new goHome
> implementation. Just need to squish the commits now which I'll do
> today or tomorrow and merge if it's not too late for that.
>
> Sadger
>
> On 13 Jul 2015 06:15, "Alberth" <albert...@gmail.com

> <mailto:corsix-th-de...@googlegroups.com>.

> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

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[Joe#]

I understand, you've provided a good list of reasons for why it can't be included in 0.50.

[Stephen E. Baker]

As an update, the first release candidate will be put up this Sunday as
scheduled; next weekend I will be on holiday/vacation and won't be able
to put up a build or merge pull requests so release candidate 2 or the
final release will be put off until the following Sunday (August 9th).
After that we can resume weekly release candidates until we're ready for
the final release as long as bugs and patches warrant it. On the off
chance this process drags on, I'm again on holiday/vacation from August
29th until September 6th and will not be near a computer during that
time. It's my hope that we can get out the final release either the
19th or 26th though.

A couple other notes:
First, 0.50 will not officially support Windows XP, and the official
Windows builds will not run on that operating system. I believe the
nightly builds produced by TravisCI still support Windows XP, and I am
open to including 3rd party Windows XP builds on our release page if
someone wants to make them, but I don't have any Windows XP systems
left. I think this is reasonable as the operating system reached end of
life over a year ago.

Secondly, I haven't heard anything recently from our Linux or OSX
packagers. Adam and ezeenova, could you let me know if you are planning
to make builds for this release, and how you're doing on that?

Thanks,

Stephen E. Baker