[L2Ork-dev] call for mentorship: version bump

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 5:40 PM Jonathan Wilkes <jon.w.wilkes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm porting the "#ffffff" color syntax from Vanilla.
>
> The thing is-- this won't be forward compatible because new patches
> will save iemgui color args as symbols. Previous versions will refuse
> to read in the new args correctly because they check for floatargs in
> those color slots of the arguments. This can give surprising behavior
> to users one or two versions behind-- they'll see breakage in colors,
> label display, and possibly other problems with patches created in the
> newer version of Purr Data. Worse, there's no way to force an error to
> be reported in the old versions, as the iemgui arg-loading code simply
> fails silently if it gets wrong arg number and/or types.
>
> Vanilla's solution was to put a big "FIXME" comment while turning off
> the ability to save the new symbolic color args for the time being.
> This creates an insidious bug where users are already inputting the
> precise "#123456" colors but continue getting the lossy behavior of
> the weirdo integers.
>
> Is this a case for a major version bump? Anything less and I'm afraid
> users on older versions won't realize the subtle change in file
> format.
>
> Honestly, I'd rather add a line to the file format that crashes the
> old versions than have subtle wrong behavior like this.
>
> Suggestions?

I'll answer my own question here:

We've actually had Vanilla's "version" global method since 2007. That allows
us to do this:

1. For the next release, hoist a bare message "pd version $whatever"
to the top of each saved patch file.
2. If the version is greater than zero, all older versions of Purr
Data will output an informative error telling
them, "file format newer than this version of Pd (trying anyway...)".
It's printed as an error in red, so that should
be as obvious as we can get given the circumstances.
3. When people come to the list inquiring about it, we can tell them
to upgrade Purr Data.

This will be a blocker for the next release, so if anyone want to take
a stab at coding it that would be much
appreciated.

Note: Vanilla added some code to compare against the current version
like "0.47", so that could be handy in the
future.

-Jonathan



>
> -Jonathan