Comments on: 2006-10-06 Trunk builds

By: testboy

testboy — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:55:54 +0000

Testing releases is not about getting new features first, but just about testing them to see if they work. One may be dissappointed if expecting more.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 23:54:17 +0000

For what it’s worth, I have to agree with Raphael here.
THere are certain limits as to what you can put the ‘testers’ through.
It’s like holding a small piece (as opposed to a reasonably complete piece) of nicely baked chicken in front of your nose, and then just after you take a small bite from it, it’s pulled away. Leaving you feeling hungry and frustrated.
You can’t just throw anything in front of us and expect us not to bite.

By: J. McNair

J. McNair — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:13:17 +0000

Raphael, you seem to understand the risks of using unstable nightly builds. You must also understand that nightly builds are always in flux. Testing a new feature is just that, testing. The Places feature set was tested and found to be broken, so it needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, developer attention is elsewhere at the moment (it seems) so it is better to drop it (temporarily, we hope) and either re-evaluate its usefulness or reimplement it properly.

Very simply, it wasn’t worth keeping in its current form, according to the devs. They don’t want to support a broken feature while trying to implement new (possibly broken) features. At worst, Firefox 3 will be places-free, but I think D. Baron doesn’t want that. Still, Fx 3 without Places is better than Fx 2 or 3 with a buggy, slow Places. :)

–JM

By: Raphael

Raphael — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:24:20 +0000

I’m not using prerelease software, I’m using nightly builds which are almost expected to be unstable AND to contain new features enabled for testing. How can I test anything if the developers are afraid to enable it because it might be broken? If I’d be testing a branch build, I’d expect it to be stable but I’m testing trunk builds and I know why: I do want the new features and I consider the tradeoff – frequent crashes, data corruption or worse – to be less significant than the advantages of new features.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 06:59:35 +0000

If places requires a redesign before be enabled again, then in it’s current form it is broken, regardless of how well it works for you. This is a fix because it removes the broken code from use.

This is the risk you take using prerelease software.

By: Raphael

Raphael — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 17:41:17 +0000

It says in the comment (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353571#c10) that “Places will be going through a redesign before being reenabled”…