Re: [Enigma-devel] Loss of lifes in Debian 0.92.1-1 enigma releases

[Ronald Lamprecht]

Hi Erich,

> > Let me hope that you do not use the current r71 trunk version as 0.92.2 
>
> Sorry, it's r71. Should I do another upload with revision r66 or so?
>
> > I can not recommend using any trunk revision >70 for playing Enigma. You 
> > may loose all scorings you achieve with these versions!

Let me give all of you some insight into the trunk development process:

I noticed the "loss of lifes" misbehaviour in Oktober, checked that 0.92 
is o.k. and scheduled the fix for later, as I knew that my code could 
not have been the reason. After Christmas I played some new levels for 
testing the current development version and got annoyed of the bug. Thus 
I spent some time on January 1st for tracking the reason and commiting 
the fix without checking any external buglists because I assumed that 
only developers have been influenced. As no one did fix the bug before 
me it seemed not to be important for them.

Or look at the r71 patch: It is a huge one with about 55k diffs - that 
means several hundred lines of code changes and additions. I commited it 
on Sunday primarily to update my other workareas and start testing the 
native windows compile. I am aware that I did brake the OSX installation 
procedure and it is likely that such a large change will need some 
smaller corrections. (Nevertheless r71 looks quite stable.)

Thus taking an arbitrary trunk revision and publishing it as a new 
Debian version with quite official looking numbering is a risk. You have 
good chances to end up with less than the official 0.92 release.

Wouldn't it be preferable to provide a stable release after each major 
release cylcle to Debian users? The current stable Debian Enigma release 
seems to be 0.81 based.

The unstable release should contain a unmistakable note about the origin 
and the status. Asking the authors of the last patches for a suitable 
revision before checking out and publishing would help.

Concerning r71: I would have suggested r70. r71 looks as stable as r70 
but introduces .enigmarc3.xml on users home directory. This file may be 
incompatible to future revisions.

The secure update procedure for theses incompatiblities is simply 
manually removing these new ".xml" files (there will be more) before 
starting a new revision - this leads to an update from the 0.92 user data.

If you stick to r71 or publish further interim releases it is up to you 
to inform the Debian users about this unsupported update procedure.

> Well, scoring is not that serious, is it?

Not for me and many others. But there are people asking all the time 
where to publish their scores to be mentioned in the next release.

r71 saves the score still in the old .enimgarc2 which will be 
autoupdated with next major release.

best regards,

Ronald