I’m down from a high of about 10 versions to 6
I have clients that use multiple versions for different projects because of this issue
Sadly CEO doesnt understand this or discounts it as “unusual” or something
As Bob noted so many years ago I’m not their “average” customer
And I accept that but if they tried to make me happy how likely is it they’d make a lot more people happy ?
Average users might not notice subtleties - they’d just update their project to the latest & be happy
Pro users would appreciate the care & consideration
Moving clients project to C# for iOS and Android
Compiles & launches on the SAME Android simulator in a fraction of the time
Which is why I believe they’ve never looked at offering consulting services. Deep down they know their product isn’t stable, feature complete, and good enough in certain areas. I, and others, always looked at consulting as a) a way to get better (sometimes painfully); and b) another revenue stream.
Would it require some overhead? Yes, absolutely. Would it require additional staff? Perhaps, but you could sub the contracting work out and just have a project manager. I know when I was doing consulting I would have done it with the stipulation that bugs I find and project needs would be dealt with on a priority basis. Otherwise there would be zero reason why I’d want to do it (with probably less money since they’d get their cut).
Not a trivial task, to be sure, but something they could have pursued.
I love the Debian way. Debian testing aka sid, is following the rapid release cycle. Everybody using this knows, he or she sits straight next to the bleeding edge.
From time to time a clone of sid is freezed and put aside to become stable with only bugfixes and patches allowed while sid continues to dance on the edge. This stable version is the right one to be used in critical missions, projects or production.
This is the reason why some ppl blame Debian, it would use old or outdated versions. This is not only a false statement, this is far from reality 'cause Debian Stable is as the name says rock stable. And by the way: This is the reason, why Debian ist the basis for many other Linux Distributions including Ubuntu.
An LTS would be nice but I doubt Xojo would invest the time to back port fixes like so many LTS versions get
it would require additional resources which they surely would tell us they dont have
This is why I’d like to see them do more tick-tock
Bug fix release. Feature Release. Bug fix release. Feature Release. Bug fix release. Feature Release.
I dont think its an open source / not open source issue
It requires the will to do it
And the resources to do it
I dont believe Xojo has either
Open source may make acquiring those resources easier since you can draw from every one
Xojo would likely have to hire new/more staff to do it
Or a change to how they do what they do to make extra LTS branches they maintain and back port critical bug fixes to
Since I doubt they’ll ever do LTS versions an alternative release strategy might work
But again there has to be, like AA, steps
And the first step is admission there IS a problem
The topic of rapid release has been an issue pretty much since it appeared
It NEVER was an issue prior to that
Xojo did major releases with tons of new features once a year and lots of bug fixes in between (like Apple MS and so many others)
Rapid Release has just turned Xojo into perpetual beta - as predicted by @MarkusWinter Sadly I thought they would manage it differently than they are/do and didnt believe him but it really didnt take long to see that was going to be the case
And here was are 15+ years still suffering with the same system, the same symptoms and the same deafening silence that there even IS a problem from Xojo
