I know it doesn't really matter to most people since they just use the development versions, but it's been quite some time since the last official build of Dolphin was released. Users commonly report issues that have long been fixed in the development builds, so why not put out another official build already?
I may have heard something about a milestone tracker for bugs and/or performance being used to determine when the next official build would be ready, but I'd think that enough progress has been made by now to justify another release in the meantime. And if that IS a thing, is there a link? It sounds interesting.
Most of these issues are things that used to work, and now don't. It's a bad idea to create a new stable build if it's worse than the previous one in certain ways.
There was talk of making 4.5 a couple of months ago, but now that Fiora and comex are making things faster left and right, that talk is pretty much history. I think everyone will appreciate not telling them to stop for a stable release testing schedule.
Just give it time. There are only so many optimizations to do, and when it winds down the topic will come up again.
(10-02-2014, 12:55 PM)MaJoR Wrote: [ -> ]There was talk of making 4.5 a couple of months ago, but now that Fiora and comex are making things faster left and right, that talk is pretty much history. I think everyone will appreciate not telling them to stop for a stable release testing schedule.
Just give it time. There are only so many optimizations to do, and when it winds down the topic will come up again.
But the problem with that is a lot of users that come and go, usually only download the official builds. Sometimes, these official builds casue problems and users give the whole emulator bad rep. More official builds can't hurt anyone.
I think Yevgeniy makes a good point.
Though I do respect the standpoint of the developers. (you guys do make the magic happen in the first place of course)
Going back in forth from 4.2 and the latest dev build, the difference feels ridiculous in terms of framerates.
Though I do see that helping the newbs out with framerate at the sacrifice of previous features would just replace one complaint with another, I still feel that at least with a newer official release, people would have the option of upgrading or keeping 4.2, after reading a disclaimer about the broken things...
Or they could just download the latest dev build....
eh, both arguments are good to me. It's whatever.
Really though, if it were me, i'd just release a dev build as 4.3 and as soon as the problems were fixed, bump it to 4.5, granted if yall had something special planned for a newer release, that would change the entire discussion.
Honestly though, I kinda gotta agree with what Zeromus from Desmume once told me on the subject.
With an open source project, does a release really matter?
After thinking about it, perhaps it really doesn't matter.
Maybe releases should only be done when something major happens in development.
In the end, it's all up to the guys in charge.
Lol okay im done rambling now.
*sigh* You guys aren't getting it. The process of creating a stable build is very specific, and it's something we've done many times before. Development happens in development builds. Eventually, after a year or so of development, a
development freeze is inacted. During the freeze, all contributions are
halted, and the only changes that can be made are hunting down regressions and fixing bugs. After several
weeks of hunting bugs and testing, the stable build is released, and normal development resumes.
Do you want to tell Fiora to stop making Dolphin faster? Do you want to tell the constant stream of new talent we've been getting lately that "no, you can't contribute now, come back in a month"? The stable build process needs to be rethought. Otherwise, we just need to wait for things to calm down a bit.
Yevgeniy Wrote:But the problem with that is a lot of users that come and go, usually only download the official builds.
Development builds are official builds. The only unofficial builds come from places other than Dolphin, like emu-cr or something.
rlaugh0095 Wrote:Going back in forth from 4.2 and the latest dev build, the difference feels ridiculous in terms of framerates.
rlaugh0095 Wrote:Really though, if it were me, i'd just release a dev build as 4.3 and as soon as the problems were fixed, bump it to 4.5,
There is no "4.2". The latest stable build is 4.0.2, which is a bugfix release of 4.0 and has none of the improvements that came after 4.0 minus specific stability fixes. Basically, there's 4.0, and then there's development builds, and that's it. The next version will either be called 4.5 or 5.0, and it will be a full stable release.
rlaugh0095 Wrote:Honestly though, I kinda gotta agree with what Zeromus from Desmume once told me on the subject.
With an open source project, does a release really matter?
After thinking about it, perhaps it really doesn't matter.
Generally yes, they don't matter, but stable builds do give us a kind of "baseline". Basically, the forum and wiki are able to ignore problems that have been fixed before the latest stable, and ignore anyone who is using builds before that point, because everyone should be up to date. And it does help our users know which builds to use. Finding 3.0 and 3.5 era builds is pretty rare now, so in that way it's doing it's job.
Fwiw, Fiora doesn't have to stop any of her work. She's free to do whatever during the feature freeze, she just can't (or rather likely won't) get new things pushed to master, and reviewing her pull requests might get delayed for a while. But it's not like she has to drop everything and sit on her hands. Same for anyone else. I'm just pointing out that it's not like certain developers would have absolutely nothing to do while a stable build is being worked on, which is kinda the impression you're giving, I feel at least. If anything, devs can work on features even longer (finding bugs, cleaning code, refining stability) before it hits master.
(10-02-2014, 11:40 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Fwiw, Fiora doesn't have to stop any of her work. She's free to do whatever during the feature freeze, she just can't (or rather likely won't) get new things pushed to master, and reviewing her pull requests might get delayed for a while. But it's not like she has to drop everything and sit on her hands. Same for anyone else. I'm just pointing out that it's not like certain developers would have absolutely nothing to do while a stable build is being worked on, which is kinda the impression you're giving, I feel at least. If anything, devs can work on features even longer (finding bugs, cleaning code, refining stability) before it hits master.
Yup.
![[Image: yrHV3G1.png]](https://i.imgur.com/yrHV3G1.png)
Couldn't some devs just start working on blocker bugs and current milestone bugs right now without waiting for a feature freeze? Unless new updates are constantly introducing regressions, I don't see why there need to be a feature freeze for work to start on a stable release.