[L2Ork-dev] updating cyclone

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hi Alexandre,
Everything you describe below is communicated by the major version number  
"0".  It means your public interface isn't yet stable, and you have the freedom 
to change it or add to it for the purpose of reaching parity with the 
Max/MSP version you are targeting.

If you want to use the words "alpha" and "beta" I'd recommend using them for
code quality of a particular release.  "Alpha" essentially means you're ready 
to focus on fixing bugs for an upcoming release (with the expectation that 
some things may still be broken, and you make need to tweak an interface 
here or there).  "Beta" means you have a fairly strong idea of which bugs remain. 
Once those bugs are fixed you can either do a release candidate-- to encourage 
users to catch any stray bugs you may have missed-- or go straight to a release.

Using "alpha" to mean you are in the stable, early stages of a process that may never 
actually be completed is confusing.

-Jonathan



2017-04-27 14:58 GMT-03:00 Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>:

What's the timeline for a stable release? I'd much prefer maintaining a branch to test these changes, and waiting for a stable release to merge than including an alpha (or even beta) version.

Well, calling it a beta/alpha or anything doesn't mean as much as it should. 
For one thing, older versions of cyclone were always marked as alpha/beta. The one in Purr Data now is 0.2 beta "something".
The main focus of cyclone 0.3 is to update it to current max version (max 7), most of the objects in cyclone were outdated to max 4.0! This task went far, there are about 4 objects that still need updates, and the idea to stop calling it alpha/beta is when that is over. But we don't really know when that will happen, or even if we'll manage to complete that. We don't have that roadmap.

But the point is that if you compare the releases, cyclone 0.3 offers tons of improvements and bug fixes. Not only the updates we've made to objects to be compliant with the current max version, but we've also dealt with zillion of issues, not to mention a completely rewritten documentation, with numerous improvements.
It is way more stable and improved than the current version in Purr Data, and it is not really like it is going through "untested" and "experimental" phase. Though we are trying a couple of new things, and they must be done and completed in the next few days as well. It just depends on Matt handing me the new magic dependency.
So i really hope you can include the new version in it, there isn't really anything else "in the way", or a major task to be done before we can call this a more "stable" release. We've worked on it for over a year now and did put a release when it was considered very mature. Our current work for cyclone 0.3 alpha 2 consists mostly in making it available for Purr Data, with a proper and working documentation, plus a couple of new objects and some improvements on how we were dealing with the "magic" feature.
Please reconsider and I hope you can include our work in Purr Data right away. I have been trying and using our new version in Purr Data for a while now, and haven't seen any issue come up.

cheers


   
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