there were problems with 9-15 Rev. 3338af9

• Sep 16, 2014 - 13:00

I would caution people not to save work in this Nightly. After reopening a big and complex score that I've worked on in successive Nightlies, I've now experienced occasional missing ottava signs and the occasional loss of anchoring of hairpins and slurs - all seeming to be random. Could the issues I describe with 3338af9 be the reason that no Nightly has been published since then?

This situation illustrates an obvious quandary for many eager end-users who need to use 2.0 now because of the enhanced features. Personally, I would be using the Beta exclusively were it not for its failure to save cross-staff notation. For my own uses, that is a critical failure - so I must use Nightlies that have surpassed Beta 1 at least in that flaw. Of course, any given Nightly could be even less stable with regard to one or more other features.

Is it always a gamble? Until the official release of 2.0 - or, at least, a Beta 2 - what's the best approach here? Can a developer say which of the Nightlies since Beta 1 is 'best' - or does it depend entirely on one's own needs and applications?

I am already completely aware that using an unstable pre-release is risky, so there's no real need for a reminder that I and people like me have chosen to accept this risk and must bear the consequences. I am just looking for practical advice here.


Comments

Hmm, I'm not aware of any recent changes that would have the effect you describe. Which is to say, whatever bug is in that nightly might well be in all builds but you just never triggered it until now. It would be most helpful if you were able to reproduce this problem, perhaps starting from the backup copy of the score. Or even just the post the already corrupt score itself. Without steps to reproduce it will be a shot in the dark, but at least we'd have something to shoot with.

Anyhow, your point is certainly valid in general. Some nightly builds may in fact introduce new bugs, so some will be more useful than others, but there is no know which are which. Speaking for myself but I suspect other developers would say the same, I test all my changes and never *deliberately* break anything, so it's not like I'd be able to tell you which of my fixes cause other problems unless someone else finds and reports the problem. So it definitely helps to have brave souls willing to push the nightly builds harder than our own testing does, and we all appreciate the effort.

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