And that, unfortunately, is the core of the problem. There has hardly been any Zdoom specific WADs released recently that don't rely on SVN features (RfOIV being the most notable exception). As Graf said, it's been a year and a quarter since the last official build of Zdoom and there have been "new" features in it that people have wanted to use all that time.Graf Zahl wrote:it should be obvious that a reasonable release schedule for ZDoom is a hopeless wish. It has been one year and 3 months now.
Then there is the additional complication that both GZdoom and, as a result, SkullTag "official" versions (albeit that Skulltag is a beta - as it always has been) are based on Zdoom's unofficial code. So what is official anyway? Therein, of course, lies Graf's frustration with the situation. He's building his code on a shifting, unofficial, sand.
Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle I guess. I didn't start using the Zdoom SVNs until very recently. The main reason for this was that I was using GZdoom more and more and Zdoom held less and less direct interest. GZdoom was clearly getting regular support from Graf and was "official" whereas I just kept Zdoom 2.1.7 on my HD, rather than an SVN, because of my own notion that it was "official". I guess it was at some point I realised that a lot of the bugs I was noticing in GZdoom could be Zdoom bugs but I had no way of telling because the version of Zdoom I was using was so old. So I grabbed whatever the current SVN was at the time and now I'm now really "into" SVN builds. I love the fact that on an almost daily basis I can grab a new version and see which bugs are fixed and start using new features immediately. Perhaps because a lot of my work is quite "selfish" (ie I edit for my own amusement and the results often don't have to be made public) the wider compatibility thing is less of an issue for me. And that brings us back to that core problem. It's been over a year since Randy drew a line in the sand and said "there's your benchmarks lads, crack on". So there is now a community of Zdoom users, a large proportion of which, who use the SVNs and who regard it as the current version and another large number who don't. If there had been a more recent official Zdoom and a regular official release schedule, I'm sure that situation would not exist. Quite why it has been allowed to get to that pint, I don't know.
The development tool side of SVN things is obviously huge. If Randy or Graf make their code available then bugs can get picked up within hours of the problem going into the code. If SVN versions were not available, then those bugs could potentially sit there for months (in Zdoom's case) and then if an "official" version got released there would be a whole mess of bugs to be picked up in one giant bug swarm .