Does anyone happen to know the purpose the builds in the /testing download section for Windoze? (I did search for this answer prior to posting.)
It seems like with the stable release, not as many members are using the nightlies and testing new code. If it is not currently being used for the following purpose, could this be download path be used to encourage members to test what is believed to be reasonably stable builds?
Only other suggestion would be to leave out the help files and libraries to keep the downloads as small as possible.
The testing folder is a junk folder. Occasionally builds with special/major new features are thrown in there. And often the opposite in size! 4 gigs because the debug symbols are put in (removing libraries wouldnt help)
But its too early in the next dev cycle to even have “stable” builds to put in there for testing right now.
I was expecting that the terminology I used might prompt a comment; I did in fact make three attempts to better define it before I gave up.
How about, “May well have quitches and minor crashes, but (hopefully) won’t delete entire projects nor catch your computer on fire”?
My thinking was, as one example, that the V5.0.0 stable could have been put there before the release was made “official”. A second possible example, throw builds there that are close to the next minor up-revision.
It doesn’t seem that many experienced users are going to be using the nightlies for the foreseeable near future; mostly due to the expectation of multiple bugs in the builds. If experienced users that follow the development know that the build in the “/testing” folder was hit with a least one can of bug-repellent then they may be more willing to download it and work with it to find the one bug still hiding in the corner.
It just seems to me that in the short term there is going to be accelerated development without accelerated user testing.
Yes, it takes more developer effort. As new features are introduced, it becomes harder and harder to cherry pick bug fixes and mature features into a “tested” branch. So much effort it would not be worth it even to get some extra testers.
However, if you want to volunteer your time to maintain some sort of “tested” branch, go ahead!
This is pretty much what happened. The build process for stable releases drops the binaries in this directory, interested people do some final manual tests on them and the files are then manually moved.
The other files that end up there are created by “patch” builds, i.e. when we make a special build containing a particular patch, usually in response to some thread on the mailing list or to try something out that may not be as portable as planned.
Last but not least, the results of building KiCad with Visual Studio are there. These are really unofficial and don’t have an installer, but VS has a few extra compiler warnings, and the binaries run without the MSYS2 runtime which could in theory be used to make a smaller distribution one day. The downside is that Python support is missing from these.
That’s mostly fine, I think. User testing will happen when there is something to test that users are waiting for.
The 5.1 cycle will have a few UI changes and some internal rework for gtk3 support — necessary for wxPython support — which will be tested mostly by interested parties.