General Discussion of MuseScore 2.0, the Trunk and the 'Nightlies'

I would like a place to discuss -- strictly from the end-users’ viewpoint -- the Nightly Builds as they are released, I know I’m not the only one who’s interested in testing them out, and I think that sharing information and commentary would be valuable for all of us who share this concern.

In my own experience, R.4309 was remarkably stable and powerful. A couple of successive Nightlies were not: one of them prompted me that it couldn’t run without DLLs that were apparently missing, and one of them couldn’t even be unzipped from the archive.

FWIW -- I’m using Windows XP with SP 3.

Anyway, I continued to use R.4309 -- and have been preoccupied doing ‘real’ work with it. I haven’t been paying attention to Nightlies since my experience with the dysfunctional ones I mentioned, but I did download the most recent one today -- R.4377.

At least I could extract it with 7-Zip, and it passed the test of opening a file, saving the file, and then quitting the program gracefully. Unfortunately I won’t be using it, as it reformatted my fingering text when I reopened the file. Even when I went back to 4309 and saved my Text Styles, I wasn’t able to load them into the file when I reopened it in 4377.

In fact, text behavior seems to have regressed between these two releases. The context (‘right-click’) menu in 4309, which included ‘Set Invisible’ and a ‘Text Properties...” option that led to a dialog box from which Styled/Unstyled could be manipulated, has been truncated in 4377 to remove both those options.

Of course, perhaps that’s temporary -- but not a good thing, nevertheless, for my own purposes.

The point of this post is that I’d like to solicit other members -- those who have the same curiosity (and temerity!) that I do about ‘beta testing’ the unofficial releases -- to do so regularly and to have a place where we can actively post about them (i.e., our perceptions of the features that seem projected to be included in version 2.0, the direction in which those features seem to be developing, issues of stability (obviously), other problems might we see (or foresee), etc.).

I started a thread similar to this one a few weeks back, and the response was ... subdued. An ‘official’ response was that the best place for these concerns was in the ‘Feature Request’ area of the forum -- but I disagree. I honestly got the impression that on-going discussion of the Trunk that will become 2.0 -- at least by MS users like me -- was not encouraged.

I understand all the points that have been made about ‘no guarantees’ with untested Nightlies -- whether about performance, stability and features or whether any functionalities will even survive to be incorporated into the next major release. And I think all of us accept those caveats and expect those limitations when we download and use the Nightlies for any reason. The disclaimers are there, and we understand their implications. I also understand a point made by someone that the development of MuseScore ‘isn’t a democracy’ -- something that goes without saying and might well have been left unsaid.

But still -- I don’t really see the point of regularly releasing the Nightlies if the developers don’t wish to encourage people to test them, talk about them or to provide a dedicated place for that discussion to take place. I propose the need for exactly such a place, and perhaps this very thread can serve that purpose.

The last time I aired these concerns, Mark Sabatella immediately responded with his substantive agreement. Mark, are you out there? Anybody else? I honestly think that the MuseScore ‘community’ can (and should) embrace those of us who -- while not developers ourselves, and while explicitly recognizing that any of our feedback may or may not have any bearing whatsoever on what choices the developers make -- might like nonetheless to have a dedicated place to discuss the future of MuseScore..

Sorry for the length of this; thanks for reading; all thoughts and comments on this subject are appreciated!