What’s in a Name

The first dev build of Dragontail Peak is going to drop soon, and I’m taking this opportunity to do some adjustments of how things are named and packaged.

Without burying the lede: the Dev/Release channels are being renamed to match their actual usage.

New Distribution Channels

• LTS: Long Term Stable release. Each ‘named’ release appears in one LTS release plus any additional bugfixes.
• Current: The ‘Development’ channel is now the ‘Current’ channel. This is the most feature-rich and current build of World Machine. It is production-ready, but the new features may still be in flux. Each named release gets as many builds as needed to complete its features. After that, it goes to LTS and the next named branch becomes current.

Why make this change?

• To better match the reality of how I actually develop World Machine
• To switch the default choice to match how I hope you will use World Machine.
• To communicate clearly which channel will auto-update and which will not (more below!)

It’s worth emphasizing that although this shakes up the organization of things a bit, nothing is lost. The LTS channel stays as the intentional, slow moving release, probably lagging the Current channel by at least ~6-12mo.

Better match actual development

When I first split out the dev and release channels, I imagined having actual new but low-risk features appear on the Release channel, while more experimental features would appear on the Dev channel before migrating as they matured. That model did not work out. In reality, development work on WM gets focused into related sets of features that work together and receive a name (aside: they are peaks and things in the PNW where I live). Essentially all development work other than bugfixes is focused into each named release. This ends up leaving the release channel as a simple archive of the final product of each named release.

Better match usage

One big downside of the ‘Dev channel’ naming is that, frankly, it sounds scarier than it is! I know when I’m faced personally with the same choice in other software — between a beta version or the stable one — I usually chose the stable one! You just don’t know how “beta” the authors consider it to be, so swerving to stability is the right choice. In reality for WM and how I develop it, the dev channel is essentially production ready and tested fairly thoroughly locally. Given that bias, the current dev releases should be called something that conveys the level of polish more accurately.

Match auto-update preferences

I’m hoping starting somewhere in the Dragontail builds to include a new automatic updater. I’ve consistently seen bug reports over the years from particular dev builds that had some issue that got quickly corrected — but the user never downloaded the fixed version, and kept running into the bug. An updater makes it seamless to stay up to date with the current builds, and you can of course opt-out if you wish.

Importantly, the LTS channel will not auto-update. You picked out a specific version to use for whatever reason, WM will honor that. You can still run the LTS and Current versions side by side if you need, just as now.

There are a few consequences to this renaming related to things like how WM appears in the start menu, where it installs, etc, but everything should be mostly seamless.

That’s all for now,

Stephen