Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-16 Thread Björnke von Gierke
On 13 Nov 2014, at 20:09, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com wrote:

 On 11/13/2014, 2:27 AM, Mark Schonewille wrote:
 Really, why wouldn't it be realistic to pay a bunch of students for a
 few hours of beta-testing (or should I say alpha-testing) some time in a
 development cycle?
 
 There's no way a few hours would catch much in a system as complex and 
 large as LiveCode. It wouldn't make a dent.

Whenever I sit down with LC, I find several problems/bugs/unwanted behaviours. 
Usually, after filing one or two bug reports, I stop using LC, because it's 
just too annoying to run into problems so often, and not being able to 
concentrate on my own tasks.


-- 

Use an alternative Dictionary viewer:
http://bjoernke.com/bvgdocu/

Chat with other RunRev developers:
http://bjoernke.com/chatrev/



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Neil Roger

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your fantastic suggestion!

I've had a quick chat with our testing master, Hanson, and he is more 
than happy to look at into integrating any advance query stacks you may 
have into our current test system.


If you do get a chance to create any of these, please fire them over to 
supp...@livecode.com and we will then forward them onto Hanson.


We're also in the process of integrating a system that allows the 
community to submit tests with any reports they create. This means that 
they should be automatically included during any internal testing we do.


Kind Regards,

Neil Roger
--
LiveCode Support Team ~ http://www.livecode.com
--





On 13/11/2014 21:14, Ralph DiMola wrote:

Neil,

With user input and Richard's moderating this thread has started to bear
some fruit. After writing HW diagnostics for years I know how challenging is
to come with thorough testing scenarios. I don't know what your QC process
for databases is but might I suggest using challenging queries. I would be
happy to set up a stack to test them along with the DBs. For example:

SELECT Table1.*, Table2.*,Table3.* FROM Table1 LEFT JOIN Table2 ON
Table1.Designation = Table2.Designation LEFT JOIN Table3 ON Table1.State =
Table3.State AND Table1.County = Table3.County WHERE (Table3.Region = 'Foo')

or

ATTACH DATABASE Table3.db AS Table3DB
SELECT Table3.*,Table1.* from Table3DB.Table3 JOIN Table1 ON Table3.CourseID
= Table1.CourseID JOIN Table2 ON Table2.County = Table1.County AND
Table2.State = Table1.State WHERE (Table3.Favorite or Table3.frog  '')

Mr. Haworth and all you other DB gurus out there, what other testing
scenarios do think should be included in the RR DB QC process?

The way I look at it the more we help RR the more we help ourselves.

  
Ralph DiMola

IT Director
Evergreen Information Services
rdim...@evergreeninfo.net

-Original Message-
From: use-livecode [mailto:use-livecode-boun...@lists.runrev.com] On Behalf
Of Neil Roger
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2014 2:59 PM
To: How to use LiveCode
Subject: Re: hair-pulling frustration

Hi Richard,

I've  attempted to replicate the semicolon issue without any success.
This could be why we have not come accross it during testing in-house.
The script that I tested with is-

global gConnectionID
on mouseUp
 global gConnectionID
 if gConnectionID is not a number then
answer error Please connect to the database first.
exit to top
 end if
 put Table1 into tTableName
 put SELECT * FROM   tTableName into tSQL

 put revDataFromQuery(,,gConnectionID,SELECT * FROM Table1;) into tData

 if item 1 of tData = revdberr then
answer error There was a problem querying the database:  cr 
tData
 else
put tData into field Data
 end if
end mouseUp


Both the inclusion and exclusion of the semi-colon return data as
expected. If possible, could you supply a stack for me to test with and
I will happily look into this further.

Kind Regards,

Neil Roger



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Peter Haworth
OK, so you mean this:

revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)

revDataFromQuery is a function, you need to either put it or get it or
set a cprop to it.  If I type the above statement into the message box I
get exactly the same error as you whether there's a semicolon or not.  If I
add put before it, everything works with or without the semicolon..

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 5:28 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

  I just tried it under 7.0 and same result - no problems with or without
 the
  semicolon.  There must be something else going on in Dr Hawkins code.
 

 The ones I posted today were typed into the message box!


 --
 Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
 (702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Bob Sneidar
The way I see things, RunRev is not an overly large company. To remain solvent 
(something that benefits us all) they probably have to prioritize what they can 
and cannot do. In House testing of every possible scenario cannot be one of the 
do’s. Frankly I am thrilled at the progress made since version 2.0. I can live 
with a few bugs. After all, no one *has* to adopt a new version of LC! If your 
older version works, use it for production. If the newer version causes you 
problems, don’t. And file a bug report while you are at it. 

Now if RunRev were as large as Microsoft, then I could see holding them 
accountable for every serious bug in their product. 

I’m not seeing the major issue here. I think a few more pats on the back of 
these guys might do more to help them excel then criticisms. After all, they 
are likely just as much raving egomaniacs (as Richmond put it) as most of us 
are. :-)

Bob S


 On Nov 13, 2014, at 14:24 , Alex Tweedly a...@tweedly.net wrote:
 
 
 Note to self :
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I do *not* have time to read, never mind get involved in, this thread. :-)
 
 
 OK. Having said that to myself - one small suggestion.
 
 It would seem touchy-feely for there to be more response on this list from 
 RR.
 
 You (Richard) are doing a great job as Community Manager, and responding here.
 How about you get an email address like rich...@runrev.com so that it does 
 feel more like a RR response :-)
 
 I suspect this list is mostly us old dinosaurs, and most of the newer users 
 are on the forums, and *we* should all know who you are - but it would maybe 
 help remind us that you have a role within RR and are effectively part of the 
 RR team taking in our input.
 
 Regards,
 -- Alex.
 
 On 13/11/2014 22:11, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 Richmond wrote:
 
  What might do some good is point out to RunRev that when they
  released their Open Source version of LiveCode they undertook
  to be more touchy-feely and more responsive to their users
  . . . and, just possibly, they may be falling short of this.
 
 Perhaps.  What should touchy-feely ideally translate to in terms of 
 specific actions?
 
 
 
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Peter Haworth
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 9:21 AM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

 revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)


Somehow, an earlier version of my reply was sent.  Here's what I meant to
send.

Knowing that you used the message box makes a big difference,  Everyone who
has checked this out used a script.

I was surprised your statement worked at all in the message box since
revDataFromQuery is a function and seems like it should need a put or
get or set, so I tried various LC versions, with/without semicolon,
with/without put, all in the message box.

LC 5.5
All combinations of put/semicolon worked.

LC 6.1
No put, with semicolon, failed error executing expression
No put, no semicolon, worked
With put, with semicolon, failed can't find handler
With put, no semicolon, failed can't find handler

LC 6.6
No put, with semicolon, failed error executing expression
No put, no semicolon, worked
With put, with semicolon, failed can't find handler
With put, no semicolon, worked

If it had something to do with the new SQLite library, there would have
been an SQL error message but it never gets as far as executing
revDataFromQuery.

My feeling is that something changed in the message box parsing routines
and the semicolon is being taken as a separator between two statements.

However, bottom line is that all works fine in a script with or without the
semicolon.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/14/2014, 11:58 AM, Peter Haworth wrote:

My feeling is that something changed in the message box parsing routines
and the semicolon is being taken as a separator between two statements.


A semicolon in any script is interpreted as a line ending, except when 
within quotation marks. If the example failed (where the semicolon is 
within the quotes) then that would be a problem with the scripts that 
interpret the message box content.


That said, it is very tricky to implement code correctly in all cases 
from the message box because of the do statements and other 
contortions it needs to use. Ideally, tests should always be conducted 
from the script editor where the intermediate interpretive layer isn't 
present.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/13/2014, 10:26 PM, Geoff Canyon wrote:

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 3:10 PM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:


I blame myself for the omissions (except when Richard G. forgives me.) :)



Bless me Richard, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last
bug report. Since then I wrote three undocumented functions and one 80-line
behemoth that was filled with hard-coded situation-specific functionality.
I also used repeat-with when I should have used repeat-for-each twice.

File two bug reports and say ten Our Kevins.


LOL! Okay.

Our Kevin, who art at RunRev,
Hollowed be thy frame
By coding done
Yet still undone in engine,
As it is in IDE.
Give us this day our weekly upgrade
And forgive us our complaints
As we forgive the multitude of releases.
And lead us not to false expectations,
But deliver us from errors,
For thine is the vision,
The power, and the glory
For all generations.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Bob Sneidar
Hah hah! I would have used “For all permutations” instead!

Bob S


On Nov 14, 2014, at 10:47 , J. Landman Gay 
jac...@hyperactivesw.commailto:jac...@hyperactivesw.com wrote:

LOL! Okay.

Our Kevin, who art at RunRev,
Hollowed be thy frame
By coding done
Yet still undone in engine,
As it is in IDE.
Give us this day our weekly upgrade
And forgive us our complaints
As we forgive the multitude of releases.
And lead us not to false expectations,
But deliver us from errors,
For thine is the vision,
The power, and the glory
For all generations.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | 
jac...@hyperactivesw.commailto:jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | 
http://www.hyperactivesw.comhttp://www.hyperactivesw.com/


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Peter Haworth
Right, it looks like something in the message box message box
interpretation scripts changed between the various releases I tested.

I guess I should file a bug report.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:38 AM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 On 11/14/2014, 11:58 AM, Peter Haworth wrote:

 My feeling is that something changed in the message box parsing routines
 and the semicolon is being taken as a separator between two statements.


 A semicolon in any script is interpreted as a line ending, except when
 within quotation marks. If the example failed (where the semicolon is
 within the quotes) then that would be a problem with the scripts that
 interpret the message box content.

 That said, it is very tricky to implement code correctly in all cases from
 the message box because of the do statements and other contortions it
 needs to use. Ideally, tests should always be conducted from the script
 editor where the intermediate interpretive layer isn't present.

 --
 Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
 HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/14/2014, 1:39 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:

Hah hah! I would have used “For all permutations” instead!


Ooh. Like. It is revised:

Our Kevin, who art at RunRev,
Hollowed be thy frame
By coding done
Yet still undone in engine,
As it is in IDE.
Give us this day our weekly upgrade
And forgive us our complaints
As we forgive the multitude of releases.
And lead us not to false expectations,
But deliver us from errors,
For thine is the vision,
The power, and the glory
For all permutations.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:38 AM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 A semicolon in any script is interpreted as a line ending, except when
 within quotation marks. If the example failed (where the semicolon is
 within the quotes) then that would be a problem with the scripts that
 interpret the message box content.


I *initially* found this in a script, which worked fine once I removed the
semicolon (which was inside the parenthesis).  I removed the semicolon, and
it began working.

Also, I always have strict compilation on.


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-14 Thread Peter Haworth
Can you send us the relevant script lines?  So far, it has worked in my
script with or without semicolons in various versions from 5.5 and up in my
testing so there must be something different in your script and mine.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:38 AM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
 
 wrote:

  A semicolon in any script is interpreted as a line ending, except when
  within quotation marks. If the example failed (where the semicolon is
  within the quotes) then that would be a problem with the scripts that
  interpret the message box content.
 

 I *initially* found this in a script, which worked fine once I removed the
 semicolon (which was inside the parenthesis).  I removed the semicolon, and
 it began working.

 Also, I always have strict compilation on.


 --
 Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
 (702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread FlexibleLearning.com
If this were a realistic option, Edinburgh would have permanent testing
staff. The language, syntax and interaction permutations are simply too vast
for any automated testing whether by machine or human. As Richard G says,
ensure your own software is robust with each new version and log any issues.
The cumulative effect covers as much as is feasible.

If you find a problem, log it don't hog it.

Hugh Senior
FLCo


--
I agree. I have always felt that RunRev should occasionally hire one or two
people for beta-testing. They could test new releases before they are
labelled pre-release. This would cost only a little money and safe hundreds,
if not thousands of people lots of frustrations.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Mark Schonewille
Really, why wouldn't it be realistic to pay a bunch of students for a 
few hours of beta-testing (or should I say alpha-testing) some time in a 
development cycle? I'm sure they could detect the bugs that every other 
developer would detect right-away, but without frustrating those 
developers because the people paid by RunRev have sorted them out already!


--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Installer Maker for LiveCode:
http://qery.us/468

Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
http://qery.us/3fi


LiveCode on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/

On 11/13/2014 09:13, FlexibleLearning.com wrote:

If this were a realistic option, Edinburgh would have permanent testing
staff. The language, syntax and interaction permutations are simply too vast
for any automated testing whether by machine or human. As Richard G says,
ensure your own software is robust with each new version and log any issues.
The cumulative effect covers as much as is feasible.

If you find a problem, log it don't hog it.

Hugh Senior
FLCo


--
I agree. I have always felt that RunRev should occasionally hire one or two
people for beta-testing. They could test new releases before they are
labelled pre-release. This would cost only a little money and safe hundreds,
if not thousands of people lots of frustrations.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Éric Miclo
Hello,

I do agree that more testing (non automatic testing) should be made before 
releasing a commercial product.
But I’m not sure RunRev will listen.

When the CEO says:
 I really would urge everyone in our community to move to 7 as soon as 
possible. We spent 18 months building it and considering the amount of change 
its getting very good results stability wise. There are issues but they are 
mostly minor.

When minor bugs are so many, I don’t consider it is minor to test and fix 
before releasing a commercial product.
And by fixing I mean test if the fix really fixes the bug so it doesn’t have to 
be reopened immediately.
It is not the amount of time spent on a product that is an indicator of quality.

My 2 cents.

Best,

ÉrIC

-- My NeXT computer will Be a Mac too! --

 Le 13 nov. 2014 à 10:27, Mark Schonewille m.schonewi...@economy-x-talk.com 
 a écrit :
 
 Really, why wouldn't it be realistic to pay a bunch of students for a few 
 hours of beta-testing (or should I say alpha-testing) some time in a 
 development cycle? I'm sure they could detect the bugs that every other 
 developer would detect right-away, but without frustrating those developers 
 because the people paid by RunRev have sorted them out already!
 
 --
 Best regards,
 
 Mark Schonewille
 
 Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
 Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
 Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
 KvK: 50277553
 
 Installer Maker for LiveCode:
 http://qery.us/468
 
 Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
 http://qery.us/3fi
 
 LiveCode on Facebook:
 https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/
 
 On 11/13/2014 09:13, FlexibleLearning.com wrote:
 If this were a realistic option, Edinburgh would have permanent testing
 staff. The language, syntax and interaction permutations are simply too vast
 for any automated testing whether by machine or human. As Richard G says,
 ensure your own software is robust with each new version and log any issues.
 The cumulative effect covers as much as is feasible.
 
 If you find a problem, log it don't hog it.
 
 Hugh Senior
 FLCo
 
 
 --
 I agree. I have always felt that RunRev should occasionally hire one or two
 people for beta-testing. They could test new releases before they are
 labelled pre-release. This would cost only a little money and safe hundreds,
 if not thousands of people lots of frustrations.
 
 --
 Best regards,
 
 Mark Schonewille
 
 
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Mark Schonewille
I'll give you 2 cents for that, Éric. I also don't think that RunRev 
will listen. Yet, I think a company should not rely on its user base for 
testing. A company can't blame its user base for not testing, if 
something appears not to work, but a user base can blame the company for 
delivering broken software. Therefore, it would be wise to listen.


--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Installer Maker for LiveCode:
http://qery.us/468

Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
http://qery.us/3fi


LiveCode on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/

On 11/13/2014 10:00, Éric Miclo wrote:

Hello,

I do agree that more testing (non automatic testing) should be made before 
releasing a commercial product.
But I’m not sure RunRev will listen.

When the CEO says:
  I really would urge everyone in our community to move to 7 as soon as possible. 
We spent 18 months building it and considering the amount of change its getting very good 
results stability wise. There are issues but they are mostly minor.

When minor bugs are so many, I don’t consider it is minor to test and fix 
before releasing a commercial product.
And by fixing I mean test if the fix really fixes the bug so it doesn’t have to 
be reopened immediately.
It is not the amount of time spent on a product that is an indicator of quality.

My 2 cents.

Best,

ÉrIC






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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richard Gaskin

Geoff Canyon wrote:

 I'm just expressing frustration about barriers to reporting bugs.
 For example, a login is required to file a bug...

...as it is for this list, which the bug system is being compared to.

Just about any publicly-accessible venue that displays user-generated 
content will either require some form of authentication, or be overrun 
to the point of uselessness by spambots.


Like this list and the forums, the account setup for RunRev's Bugzilla 
DB is just a one-time thing.  And like the forums, you can choose to 
have it remember your login, so from that moment forward you'll never 
need to log in again.



 ...and the bug submission form all but requires an example stack.

But seems the key word there, because while it can sometimes be useful 
to submit an example stack it isn't a requirement.   Most of the reports 
there have no attachments at all, even those submitted by RunRev staff 
themselves.


All that's truly needed is any description of the issue clear enough to 
allow it to be reproduced by the maintainers.


Like nearly all bug reporting systems they suggest a step-by-step 
recipe, but sometimes that's not needed.  Many submissions are just a 
single line, like Run this in the Message Box:  some command.


In some cases, like the report Dr. Hawkins referred to that Peter had 
submitted about breakpoints, the issue may elude a reliable recipe.  In 
that report many from both the community and RunRev have worked toward 
arriving at a repeatable recipe, yet even now there appears to be some 
disagreement as to whether the recipes there actually work.


But even in those cases, Ben, Kevin and others at RunRev have encouraged 
us to go ahead and submit the issue anyway.  Just include the best info 
you have, and the core team and the community can continue to add notes 
there as they work toward an actionable diagnosis.


When a recipe is truly elusive, that's when this list and the forums 
become very valuable:


By describing the issue among peers, we can solicit feedback from others 
who may have experienced what we're seeing, or something similar enough 
to be relevant, and together we can work toward an actionable 
description of the problem.



 I understand the desire to get clear, actionable bug reports,
 and I understand the need to not waste limited team resources
 on bad bug reports, but if the requirements are causing Jacque
 to fail to report a bug, that's a huge issue.

In this comparison between posting bugs to this user-to-user discussion 
list vs. putting them into the bug DB where they can be acted on, I 
don't think Jacque's comment applies.


After all, it's not like she choose to take the time to report it here 
either.


All she noted was that sometimes when she's under a heavy deadline to 
ship something with the version she has, she doesn't take the time to 
submit a bug report at all, either here or in the bug DB.


I noted in reply to her post that I often to do the same, as we all do 
when we're busy.


None of us is obliged to submit bug reports. We can choose to submit 
them when a bug impacts our work to the point that it benefits us to see 
it resolved.  Or not.  It's entirely voluntary.



Looking forward

As you noted the current version of the Bugzilla implementation RunRev 
has is much improved over earlier versions, and there may be ways it 
could be streamlined further still.


Many years ago one of our community members, Ken Ray, made a nifty 
plugin stack to submit and review Bugzilla posts from within the IDE.


It's long since outdated and he's been too busy with other commitments 
to maintain it, and like myself and others, he's found the Web 
implementation usable enough that it hasn't been an impediment for him.


But if going to the Web page is holding folks back from submitting a 
bug, I'm sure Ken would grant permission for anyone with sufficient time 
and interest to rewrite his stack to work with the current bug DB.


It's available as Revzilla, the first link on this page:
http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/livecode/downloads.htm

If there's interest I'd be happy to contact him to get explicit 
permission for such a revision.


That's just one option.  There may be others.

What other things might we consider to make filing bug reports into the 
bug DB significantly more efficient than filing them here in this 
user-to-user list?


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org




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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Sean Cole (Pi)
HI Richard,

I have a suggestion for this, having just read the entire thread.

I too find it hard at times to get the time to even write here let alone
fill out a report on Bugzilla. And then to go through the process of
creating a recipe or sample stack. The reason for this is obvious, that
like many others here we are too busy actually making products (or trying
to) for our paying clients to set deadlines (often unreasonable, mostly due
to their ongoing misconception to the time it takes to make software
despite attempts to help them appreciate or understand it). The Bugzilla
form is, I'm sure you'd agree, far more involved than writing an email. And
I in turn appreciate that protocols need to be in place to avoid spammers,
etc.

How about this approach (which is nothing new - Apple use a similar system
and I personally have had much success with it). In the LiveCode app itself
(both Commercial and Community) in the Help menu should be a button to
submit a report. This can either take you to a basic form on the web or
internally in the app itself (a better option to keep down spam). This goes
through to a private list that only those on the RunRev development team
can read. This form should be far simpler than that found on Bugzilla,
i.e., Name, email, symptoms noticed, option to upload stack. If it was
included in the IDE then it would automatically gather data like the
platform, version number, etc. The team member that picks it up can then
decide if it is worth adding to Bugzilla, adding the submitters email to
the list and requesting more info via the Bugzilla repository if needed.

Psychologically this works in favour of the end user. They would be more
likely to provide feedback willingly if the thought that it was easy and
involved far less steps. You could even have a button on the form to
provide more details that could log you right into your Bugzilla account in
a one step process filling in any data you'd already provided and those
acquired from the system.

I have a bug (Bug 13801 http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13801) I
reported a little while back that, because I had no time because of my
clients demands on my time, has been marked as 'Resolved' due to my not
responding to their request for a sample stack. When my time is a little
more free'd up (i.e., not now, despite my ability to write this email -
proof that what you said earlier was bumpkin and unfair - emails are easier
to write than are sample stacks that can replicate issues along with
recipes.) I will be able to reopen the report and prove that it is indeed
an issue that needs resolving.

Here are some more reasons I find using Bugzilla so frustrating
(infuriating at times). The search feature (a term I use lightly) is
appalling. Loading it (bearing in mind I have a 150MB internet line) takes
over 10 seconds to load. Every. Single. Time. That. I. Want. To. Do. A.
New. Search!! So, trying to track down if someone else has already done one
is laborious. If i enter my search in the bar at the top of the page it
only returns new and pending results. So resolved ones are not shown. But
that is not made clear in the search bar. So then you have to go to the
advanced search which is not clear on how to access (at the top we have
buttons for Home, New  Search then a Search Button after the search
dialogue - Is that clear?). When I add a comment to a bug and click the
'save changes' button it saves but then takes me to the next bug in the
list. As an alternative I can write a rant on here with far more
satisfaction and far less time wasted ;)

Simple is best, my favourite philosophy. A simple form in the IDE that gets
submitted for review and/or follow up. Far more likely to get results.

All the best


On 13 November 2014 14:39, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

  I'm just expressing frustration about barriers to reporting bugs.
  For example, a login is required to file a bug...

 ...as it is for this list, which the bug system is being compared to.

 Just about any publicly-accessible venue that displays user-generated
 content will either require some form of authentication, or be overrun to
 the point of uselessness by spambots.




Sean Cole
*Pi Digital Productions Ltd*
www.pidigital.co.uk
+44(1634)402193
+44(7702)116447
π
'Don't try to think outside the box. Just remember the truth: There is no
box!'
'For then you realise it is not the box you are trying to look outside of,
but it is yourself!'

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from your 

Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richard Gaskin

Éric Miclo wrote:

 I do agree that more testing (non automatic testing) should be made
 before releasing a commercial product.
 But I’m not sure RunRev will listen.

 When the CEO says:
  I really would urge everyone in our community to move to 7 as
 soon as possible. We spent 18 months building it and considering
 the amount of change its getting very good results stability wise.
 There are issues but they are mostly minor.

 When minor bugs are so many, I don’t consider it is minor to test
 and fix before releasing a commercial product.
 And by fixing I mean test if the fix really fixes the bug so it
 doesn’t have to be reopened immediately.
 It is not the amount of time spent on a product that is an indicator
 of quality.

 My 2 cents.

 Best,

 ÉrIC

 -- My NeXT computer will Be a Mac too! --


Re/Code recently posted the full video of their interview with Apple VP 
Greg Joswiak, discussing iOS 8.0.1 bugs among other things:

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/12/greg-joswiak-full-interview/

iOS 8.0.1 was sent out in response to critical bugs in v8.0, and it 
turned out that the fix itself required fixing, as 8.0.1 wound up 
bricking some user's phones.


In the video the interviewer raises the larger question of overall QA, 
and we're all familiar with recent issues there from iMaps forward.


Watching the video, I don't feel Joswiak's obvious pride in Apple is at 
all misplaced.  Sure, there have been many issues, sometimes critical 
ones, in both iOS and OS X in recent years, and this may seem surprising 
given the wealth of resources Apple has at their disposal which would 
seem more than sufficient to prevent such things.


Software is complex stuff.

I don't think it was a mistake for Tim Cook to suggest we upgrade our 
Apple devices to the latest software version which later bricked some 
phones, and I don't think it was a mistake for Kevin to suggest that we 
use the latest version of his company's software.


Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, both CEOs were mistaken about 
the fitness of the final deliverable, and both companies have devoted 
considerable resources to addressing the issues once they became evident.


I'd wager that Apple has now added additional QA review steps to prevent 
the specific issues that affected iOS 8.0.1, and I'd wager RunRev has 
done the same with the issues evident in 7.0.


Late-stage regressions are especially troubling for all of us. 
developers and users alike, because in the late stages it's especially 
hard to detect such things as might have happened during earlier Beta 
periods.  When unpredictable events occurs late-stage it becomes more 
likely that a software will be delivered that makes standalones unable 
to quit, or bricks people's phones.


I wouldn't assume that either Apple or RunRev spends nothing on internal 
testing.  On the contrary, as a percentage of payroll I'd be surprised 
if RunRev's costs for that weren't a multiple of Apple's.


I volunteered for this role of Community Manager because LiveCode is 
very important to my own business interests and those of my clients. 
Part of this role is to advocate for community concerns, and I agree 
that QA is critical.


We *all* want to see QA improved, ever more so going forward.  The folks 
at RunRev have more at stake in this than most of us.


Those of us who read the bug DB regularly have a good appreciation for 
the level of engagement the core team has in the QA process.


That v7.0 shipped with show-stoppers is annoying to all of us, and 
exploring ways to improve the QA process is the focus of my meeting with 
Ben later today.


Sean's suggestion of including a reporting item in the Help menu is a 
very good one, and I'll be sure to raise it at the meeting.


Any other specific actionable items like that are very welcome, and can 
help us all refine the process of making complex software ever more robust.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richard Gaskin

Sean Cole wrote:


I have a suggestion for this, having just read the entire thread.

How about this approach (which is nothing new - Apple use a similar
system and I personally have had much success with it). In the
LiveCode app itself (both Commercial and Community) in the Help menu
should be a button to submit a report. This can either take you to a
basic form on the web or internally in the app itself (a better
option to keep down spam).


That's an excellent suggestion - I'll pursue that with Ben later this
morning.



I have a bug (Bug 13801

http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13801) I

reported a little while back that, because I had no time because of
my clients demands on my time, has been marked as 'Resolved' due to
my not responding to their request for a sample stack. When my time
is a little more free'd up (i.e., not now, despite my ability to
write this email - proof that what you said earlier was bumpkin and
unfair - emails are easier to write than are sample stacks that can
replicate issues along with recipes.) I will be able to reopen the
report and prove that it is indeed an issue that needs resolving.


My apologies if what I wrote seemed unfair.

It's statistically accurate to note that an overwhelming majority of
issues in the bug DB do not have example stacks attached, and that
includes the 1600+ items fixed over the last year.

From time to time a given issue may elude a simple recipe, and in those
cases it may be beneficial to provide an example stack.

It's helpful that you provided the link to the report, as we can see
there that while Hanson asked if you had a sample stack he never
required it for you to re-open the report if you choose to do so.

The one thing he did require is that you please try to see the issue in
the latest build, and given the scope of changes between builds lately
it's not impossible it may have been addressed while fixing other things.

One of the benefits of an open source project having a Community Manager
is that you get another whipping post: yours truly. :)  I'm happy to 
advocate any community concern that hasn't been sufficiently addressed 
through other channels.


In this case, however, the only action needed is to verify that the 
issue remains in the latest version, and to write one sentence there 
noting if that's the case.  I haven't seen this myself, so I'll have to 
rely on your help on that.


As Hanson wrote there, with your notice that the issue remains they'll 
devote internal resources to trying to reproduce it.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richmond

On 13/11/14 18:22, Richard Gaskin wrote:

snip

Software is complex stuff.

I don't think it was a mistake for Tim Cook to suggest we upgrade our 
Apple devices to the latest software version which later bricked some 
phones, and I don't think it was a mistake for Kevin to suggest that 
we use the latest version of his company's software.


snip



Certainly, slagging off RunRev does nobody any good at all.

What might do some good is point out to RunRev that when they released 
their Open Source version of LiveCode they undertook
to be more touchy-feely and more responsive to their users . . . and, 
just possibly, they may be falling short of this.


Also, as I mentioned earlier, some of us are raving egomaniacs who 
aren't going to do anything unless we get our egos tickled

as a result; hence my suggestion about T-shirts and so on.

One of the more important reasons Communism failed was its refusal to 
acknowledge that complete, uninterested altruism
only exists in fairy stories, and the profit motive is very deeply 
entrenched in human nature . . .


I believe there needs to be:

1. a set list of incentives on offer for bug detection.

2. a strictly defined procedure [a detailed bug-report form online ] 
for bug reporting.


3. a regular interval between dp/rc releases so that beta-testers are 
aware of how much

time they have at their disposal to do any testing.

As I mentioned earlier, WINE have a rather good way of doing things,

and Canonical do with Ubuntu:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseSchedule

maybe RunRev could do something like that.

Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/13/2014, 1:50 AM, Geoff Canyon wrote:

if the requirements are causing Jacque to fail to
report a bug, that's a huge issue.


Well, to be fair, it doesn't always prevent me from reporting things. If 
I have time I do create an example stack, especially if my current work 
can't proceed without a bug fix. But I've also found that if a problem 
is pretty obvious, about 80% of the time someone else will report it. 
The failure of the command keys is one example where there were multiple 
reports without my help.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/13/2014, 2:27 AM, Mark Schonewille wrote:

Really, why wouldn't it be realistic to pay a bunch of students for a
few hours of beta-testing (or should I say alpha-testing) some time in a
development cycle?


There's no way a few hours would catch much in a system as complex and 
large as LiveCode. It wouldn't make a dent.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

 On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

  SELECT * FROM sometable;  worked before the change with SQLite.  Now,
 it
  is necessary to remove the semicolon.
 

 I just tried this using LC 5.5.4 (prior to the SQLite library change) and
 LC 6.6.2 (after the SQLite library change), with and without the semicolon
 and all tests worked fine.

 You mentioned a parsing error - did you mean an LC compile error or an
 SQLite error?  Either way, what was the error?


revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)
yields
Message execution error:
Error description: value: error executing expression
Hint: )

While if I leave out the semicolon, it gives me all the data in the table.

This from 7.0-RC2 moments ago
-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/13/2014, 12:20 PM, Richmond wrote:

I believe there needs to be:

1. a set list of incentives on offer for bug detection.


I wonder if it would be possible to extend a user's license for a short 
period after a certain number of verified bug reports has been submitted.


For community edition users, perhaps a larger number of verified bugs 
would allow a week or so of commercial access.


I suspect this would be difficult or too time-consuming to implement on 
RR's end though. But I think it would be a better incentive than a tee 
shirt and wouldn't cost the company much outside of the time to maintain it.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Neil Roger

Hi Richard,

I've  attempted to replicate the semicolon issue without any success. 
This could be why we have not come accross it during testing in-house. 
The script that I tested with is-


global gConnectionID
on mouseUp
   global gConnectionID
   if gConnectionID is not a number then
  answer error Please connect to the database first.
  exit to top
   end if
   put Table1 into tTableName
   put SELECT * FROM   tTableName into tSQL

   put revDataFromQuery(,,gConnectionID,SELECT * FROM Table1;) into tData

   if item 1 of tData = revdberr then
  answer error There was a problem querying the database:  cr  
tData

   else
  put tData into field Data
   end if
end mouseUp


Both the inclusion and exclusion of the semi-colon return data as 
expected. If possible, could you supply a stack for me to test with and 
I will happily look into this further.


Kind Regards,

Neil Roger
--
LiveCode Support Team ~ http://www.livecode.com
--







On 13/11/2014 19:09, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)
yields
Message execution error:
Error description: value: error executing expression
Hint: )



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Peter Haworth
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)
 yields
 Message execution error:
 Error description: value: error executing expression
 Hint: )

 While if I leave out the semicolon, it gives me all the data in the table.

 This from 7.0-RC2 moments ago


Thanks for the clarification.  SInce this works in 6.6.2 which uses the new
SQLite library but not in 7.0rc2, it looks to be a 7.0rc2 bug.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Geoff Canyon
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 1:06 PM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 On 11/13/2014, 1:50 AM, Geoff Canyon wrote:

 if the requirements are causing Jacque to fail to
 report a bug, that's a huge issue.


 Well, to be fair, it doesn't always prevent me from reporting things. If I
 have time I do create an example stack, especially if my current work can't
 proceed without a bug fix. But I've also found that if a problem is pretty
 obvious, about 80% of the time someone else will report it. The failure of
 the command keys is one example where there were multiple reports without
 my help.


I didn't mean to imply that the system is preventing you from entering any
bugs; I'm saying that given your many years of experience and dedication to
the platform if the system prevents you from entering even a single bug,
that's bad.
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/13/2014, 2:32 PM, Geoff Canyon wrote:

I didn't mean to imply that the system is preventing you from entering any
bugs; I'm saying that given your many years of experience and dedication to
the platform if the system prevents you from entering even a single bug,
that's bad.


The thing is, I don't blame the system at all, I think it's my own 
fault. As a developer, I always need a reproducible recipe to fix bugs, 
and requiring a stack that provides the recipe is reasonable. I blame 
myself for the omissions (except when Richard G. forgives me.) :)


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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RE: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Ralph DiMola
Neil,

With user input and Richard's moderating this thread has started to bear
some fruit. After writing HW diagnostics for years I know how challenging is
to come with thorough testing scenarios. I don't know what your QC process
for databases is but might I suggest using challenging queries. I would be
happy to set up a stack to test them along with the DBs. For example:

SELECT Table1.*, Table2.*,Table3.* FROM Table1 LEFT JOIN Table2 ON
Table1.Designation = Table2.Designation LEFT JOIN Table3 ON Table1.State =
Table3.State AND Table1.County = Table3.County WHERE (Table3.Region = 'Foo')

or

ATTACH DATABASE Table3.db AS Table3DB
SELECT Table3.*,Table1.* from Table3DB.Table3 JOIN Table1 ON Table3.CourseID
= Table1.CourseID JOIN Table2 ON Table2.County = Table1.County AND
Table2.State = Table1.State WHERE (Table3.Favorite or Table3.frog  '')

Mr. Haworth and all you other DB gurus out there, what other testing
scenarios do think should be included in the RR DB QC process?

The way I look at it the more we help RR the more we help ourselves.

 
Ralph DiMola
IT Director
Evergreen Information Services
rdim...@evergreeninfo.net

-Original Message-
From: use-livecode [mailto:use-livecode-boun...@lists.runrev.com] On Behalf
Of Neil Roger
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2014 2:59 PM
To: How to use LiveCode
Subject: Re: hair-pulling frustration

Hi Richard,

I've  attempted to replicate the semicolon issue without any success. 
This could be why we have not come accross it during testing in-house. 
The script that I tested with is-

global gConnectionID
on mouseUp
global gConnectionID
if gConnectionID is not a number then
   answer error Please connect to the database first.
   exit to top
end if
put Table1 into tTableName
put SELECT * FROM   tTableName into tSQL

put revDataFromQuery(,,gConnectionID,SELECT * FROM Table1;) into tData

if item 1 of tData = revdberr then
   answer error There was a problem querying the database:  cr 
tData
else
   put tData into field Data
end if
end mouseUp


Both the inclusion and exclusion of the semi-colon return data as 
expected. If possible, could you supply a stack for me to test with and 
I will happily look into this further.

Kind Regards,

Neil Roger
-- 
LiveCode Support Team ~ http://www.livecode.com
--







On 13/11/2014 19:09, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
 revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)
 yields
 Message execution error:
 Error description: value: error executing expression
 Hint: )


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richard Gaskin

Richmond wrote:

 What might do some good is point out to RunRev that when they
 released their Open Source version of LiveCode they undertook
 to be more touchy-feely and more responsive to their users
 . . . and, just possibly, they may be falling short of this.

Perhaps.  What should touchy-feely ideally translate to in terms of 
specific actions?



 Also, as I mentioned earlier, some of us are raving egomaniacs who
 aren't going to do anything unless we get our egos tickled
 as a result; hence my suggestion about T-shirts and so on.

That's a good idea.  Ego is very important, a key motivator in so many 
aspects of life.  Mention in the About box is a start, but if a t-shirt 
helps that seems easy enough to do.


I'd also like to see a Community Contributors page listing those who've 
contributed to the project, and Steven at RunRev is keen to add that 
with some other changes they're making to clean up the site's taxonomy.



 As I mentioned earlier, WINE have a rather good way of doing things,

 and Canonical do with Ubuntu:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseSchedule

 maybe RunRev could do something like that.

You know I loves me some Ubuntu, but I have to acknowledge that their 
six-month fixed cadence is a highly controversial thing, not least of 
all within their office.


Last I heard they've decided to stick with the six-month cycle, but 
they've discussed many other models and apparently got close to choosing 
one of the alternatives a little while ago.


A fixed schedule is helpful in some respects, but is also limiting on 
others.  Among other things it requires that work be broken up into 
six-month blocks (or actually about 4 months, since the first month 
after release requires planning the work for the next one, and the last 
month is feature-freeze), and not everything fits into blocks of a fixed 
size.


They do manage to pursue bigger objectives, like Ubuntu Mobile, Mir, and 
other projects, but if those finish later than mid-way through a cycle 
they may have to postpone rollout until the next one, losing time that a 
different model wouldn't require them to.


Speaking of:

This week is the Ubuntu Online Summit, where v15.04 is being planned. 
If you want to participate, or even list listen in to learn the process 
by which Ubuntu is made, the schedule is here:

http://summit.ubuntu.com/uos-1411/

Yesterday I attended the File Manager session and Mark Shuttleworth's 
keynote.  Learned a lot from both.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Alex Tweedly


Note to self :
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I am *not* getting involved in this thread.
I do *not* have time to read, never mind get involved in, this 
thread. :-)



OK. Having said that to myself - one small suggestion.

It would seem touchy-feely for there to be more response on this list 
from RR.


You (Richard) are doing a great job as Community Manager, and responding 
here.
How about you get an email address like rich...@runrev.com so that it 
does feel more like a RR response :-)


I suspect this list is mostly us old dinosaurs, and most of the newer 
users are on the forums, and *we* should all know who you are - but it 
would maybe help remind us that you have a role within RR and are 
effectively part of the RR team taking in our input.


Regards,
-- Alex.

On 13/11/2014 22:11, Richard Gaskin wrote:

Richmond wrote:

 What might do some good is point out to RunRev that when they
 released their Open Source version of LiveCode they undertook
 to be more touchy-feely and more responsive to their users
 . . . and, just possibly, they may be falling short of this.

Perhaps.  What should touchy-feely ideally translate to in terms of 
specific actions?





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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Neil Roger n...@livecode.com wrote:

 Both the inclusion and exclusion of the semi-colon return data as
 expected. If possible, could you supply a stack for me to test with and I
 will happily look into this further.


I'll see what I can pop together.

And now, I am getting an empty return (rather than data or error) when I
include the semicolon . . .


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Richard Gaskin

Alex Tweedly wrote:


It would seem touchy-feely for there to be more response on this list
from RR.


I tend to feel the same, but as with so many things it's a balancing act 
- after all, one of the reasons we want them here is to tell them to go 
away so they can spend their time fixing bugs. :)


We have seen a strong increase in other communications like the 
newsletters and the blog, and from time to time we see Fraser, Neil, 
Ben, and once in a while even Kevin here, more so than in years past.


Certainly wouldn't hurt to see more of them (though Neil posted here 
just this morning), but with all they've been doing it's not always easy 
to get the time for more posts here and in the forums than they make 
already.




You (Richard) are doing a great job as Community Manager, and responding
here.
How about you get an email address like richard at runrev.com so that it
does feel more like a RR response :-)


Two reasons:

1. I'm not an employee of RunRev, and volunteered primarily to support 
community contributions to the open source project.   I feel it's 
important in a role of community advocacy to be able to speak candidly, 
and an address at the corporate domain might seem a mixed message.


2. I'm lazy.  I do have an address at livecode.org (the community side 
of things), but simply hadn't taken the time to set up a separate 
subscription to this list under that address.  I get mail there, though, 
and note it in posts where I'm wearing the CM hat.


That said, I took your advice and just set up a subscription from the 
.org address.   If you can read this, it worked.


As a practical matter (read, I still run a business in between these 
volunteer activities) I may not always remember to change my default 
address when replying, but I'll continue to try to use my CM sigline 
where appropriate.




I suspect this list is mostly us old dinosaurs, and most of the newer
users are on the forums, and *we* should all know who you are - but it
would maybe help remind us that you have a role within RR and are
effectively part of the RR team taking in our input.


Unless you spend a lot of time hanging out with FOSS geeks, it's not 
always clear what a Community Manager even is.


I didn't really know either until I met Jono Bacon back when he was the 
Ubuntu Community Manager, and I didn't really understand the scope of 
the role until I read his book, The Art of Community.


Ubuntu has been a very liberating platform for many of my business 
activities, both client and server, and the more I learn about how it's 
made the more it's become clear that it would be very difficult to pull 
that off if it were solely a corporate effort or solely a community 
effort.


Many such projects really benefit a lot from the partnership between the 
corporate stewards and a supportive community, accomplishing more 
together than they could alone.


When Kevin announced that LC was going FOSS, he can tell you how 
annoying I became in my insistence that the project could use a CM to 
really make the most of this new community focus.


After enough times of him reminding me that he needs to keep his staff 
on engineering and QA, I finally just volunteered for the role as my own 
contribution to the project.  I justify the expense in the same way I 
donate resources to the Ubuntu project:  I run a business dependent on 
technology, and it benefits the work I do to see the tech I need thrive.


In an environment in which most of the current audience spends most of 
our time making and using proprietary software, there's a lot for all of 
us to learn about how this collaboration between the business and the 
community can work to the greatest benefit of our own goals.


When I first took on this role we put an outline of some of that into 
the newsletter:

http://newsletters.livecode.com/april/issue169/newsletter1.html

But that's not enough.  There's so much to learn and discover.  LiveCode 
is a very big deal, not only in the scope of its code base but in its 
potential impact on the world.


Together I believe we can see a world in which anyone with a computing 
device can get more out of it by truly mastering it through LiveCode.


As we go forward, with good suggestions like Sean's this morning and the 
others that come along, step by step we'll get there.


--
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Manager
rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Peter Haworth
I just tried it under 7.0 and same result - no problems with or without the
semicolon.  There must be something else going on in Dr Hawkins code.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Neil Roger n...@livecode.com wrote:

 Hi Richard,

 I've  attempted to replicate the semicolon issue without any success. This
 could be why we have not come accross it during testing in-house. The
 script that I tested with is-

 global gConnectionID
 on mouseUp
global gConnectionID
if gConnectionID is not a number then
   answer error Please connect to the database first.
   exit to top
end if
put Table1 into tTableName
put SELECT * FROM   tTableName into tSQL

put revDataFromQuery(,,gConnectionID,SELECT * FROM Table1;) into
 tData

if item 1 of tData = revdberr then
   answer error There was a problem querying the database:  cr 
 tData
else
   put tData into field Data
end if
 end mouseUp


 Both the inclusion and exclusion of the semi-colon return data as
 expected. If possible, could you supply a stack for me to test with and I
 will happily look into this further.

 Kind Regards,

 Neil Roger
 --
 LiveCode Support Team ~ http://www.livecode.com
 --







 On 13/11/2014 19:09, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

 revDataFromQuery(,,17,SELECT * FROM vader_darth__001_dna;)
 yields
 Message execution error:
 Error description: value: error executing expression
 Hint: )



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

 I just tried it under 7.0 and same result - no problems with or without the
 semicolon.  There must be something else going on in Dr Hawkins code.


The ones I posted today were typed into the message box!


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-13 Thread Geoff Canyon
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 3:10 PM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 I blame myself for the omissions (except when Richard G. forgives me.) :)


Bless me Richard, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last
bug report. Since then I wrote three undocumented functions and one 80-line
behemoth that was filled with hard-coded situation-specific functionality.
I also used repeat-with when I should have used repeat-for-each twice.

File two bug reports and say ten Our Kevins.
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Mark Schonewille
I agree. I have always felt that RunRev should occasionally hire one or 
two people for beta-testing. They could test new releases before they 
are labelled pre-release. This would cost only a little money and safe 
hundreds, if not thousands of people lots of frustrations.


--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Installer Maker for LiveCode:
http://qery.us/468

Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
http://qery.us/3fi


LiveCode on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/

On 11/11/2014 20:25, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

I can't help but wonder what it would take to get runrev to follow normal
practice and actually get something to alpha level before calling it a
developer preview, beta by a release candidate (ok, that still wouldn't
be normal), and working rather than early beta before release.

If I sold something at these stages, I'd be out of business by sundown.

Do the developers even pretend to use the IDE before slapping release
candidate on it?  Do they even have some kind of test suite?

The sheer number of pieces of working code that have broken when going from
5.5 to 7.0 is beyond belief, as is the giant step backward in the IDE.

I used to have to kill livecode frequently for the phantom shadow
variable problem.  While that happens more often under 6 (which is why I
could never use it) and 7, I now usually have to kill the whole thing
before that happens, as I can't get it to set a breakpoint, or even
acknowedge that I've clicked anything, delays of several seconds, and so
forth.

In addition to the others I've mentioned here an in other recent posts, the
recompile of sqlite is not quite compatible with the old, and behaves
differently.  For example, a semicolon at the end of an entry without
begin/end transaction now causes a parsing error.

Moving forward is one thing, but the only near release grade version is
5.x, which itself isn't quite ready for primetime.

OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that never
should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Mark Schonewille

Jacque,

I teach a class for free and if one student doesn't understand one word, 
I spend some extra time with that student to make sure he or she 
understands it. If I didn't do this, I would lose the students one by 
one and in the end I'd be the only one understanding the lesson. So, I 
guess it means I slow down until every student understands all words.


--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Installer Maker for LiveCode:
http://qery.us/468

Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
http://qery.us/3fi


LiveCode on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/

On 11/11/2014 22:53, J. Landman Gay wrote:

On 11/11/2014, 3:23 PM, Richmond wrote:

Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being swept
along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no reason
to change that opinion.


Suppose while teaching English, you were not paid by the time you put
in, but rather by the number of students who learn each word. If you
teach 10 students and they all learn the word, you get paid for 10 words.

If one student does not learn the word, then you must go back and
re-teach it until the student understands it. You don't get paid for
his word until that happens.

If 9 of your students learn the word but one does not, would you stop
introducing new words in class until the one student understands it? Or
would you re-teach that student on your own time? Or would you just
postpone it for a while because it affects only one person?

Suppose 6 students don't understand the word. In that case you would
probably decide to re-teach it during class time because so many
students are affected. The four remaining students would be idle until
that is done and may feel you are depriving them of a full education.

Suppose 3 students don't understand it. Where would you draw the line?
Remember, you get paid by the word.



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:15 PM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 An unresponsive IDE was mentioned. The editor and the IDE can both become
 frozen if you are debugging and you try to do something else without
 exiting debug mode. Not only can you not type into the editor, which is to
 be expected, but most of your stack and even the IDE won't respond either
 (though the message box still works, and the app browser.) Almost
 everything else just stops and you are in a state of suspension while the
 engine waits for debugging to finish. The solution is to hit the blue
 square to stop debugging, or to hit the Run button to execute the rest of
 the handler, and everything picks up again. I've never seen the IDE freeze
 up outside of that situation.


What works, however, is far more limited than in 5.5.

The freezes I see include while editing or scrolling, when it freezes for
2-5 seconds before accepting clicks or keys, and just plain locking up
*after* exiting debugging and refusing evermore to make any changes,
requiring a restart of livecode.


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Richmond


On 11/12/2014 04:25 PM, Mark Schonewille wrote:

Jacque,

I teach a class for free and if one student doesn't understand one 
word, I spend some extra time with that student to make sure he or she 
understands it. If I didn't do this, I would lose the students one by 
one and in the end I'd be the only one understanding the lesson. So, I 
guess it means I slow down until every student understands all words.


I have parents who ask me how long it will take me to get through a 
textbook, and I
always tell them I don't know . . . because pupils are all different and 
one must work at the rate that is best for the slowest.


Richmond.



--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Installer Maker for LiveCode:
http://qery.us/468

Buy my new book Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner 
http://qery.us/3fi


LiveCode on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/runrev/

On 11/11/2014 22:53, J. Landman Gay wrote:

On 11/11/2014, 3:23 PM, Richmond wrote:

Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being swept
along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no reason
to change that opinion.


Suppose while teaching English, you were not paid by the time you put
in, but rather by the number of students who learn each word. If you
teach 10 students and they all learn the word, you get paid for 10 
words.


If one student does not learn the word, then you must go back and
re-teach it until the student understands it. You don't get paid for
his word until that happens.

If 9 of your students learn the word but one does not, would you stop
introducing new words in class until the one student understands it? Or
would you re-teach that student on your own time? Or would you just
postpone it for a while because it affects only one person?

Suppose 6 students don't understand the word. In that case you would
probably decide to re-teach it during class time because so many
students are affected. The four remaining students would be idle until
that is done and may feel you are depriving them of a full education.

Suppose 3 students don't understand it. Where would you draw the line?
Remember, you get paid by the word.



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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Bob Sneidar
Let me just say that for some folks who do not have enough time to report bugs, 
they certainly have found an abundance of time to post their frustrations to 
this list! Just sayin’. 

Bob S


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Richmond

On 12/11/14 19:50, Bob Sneidar wrote:

Let me just say that for some folks who do not have enough time to report bugs, 
they certainly have found an abundance of time to post their frustrations to 
this list! Just sayin’.

Bob S


___



Ooo! Bi*chy :)

The point that came out of this discussion is that the LiveCode 
'Community' are dividing into two camps:


1. The Open Source, willing-to-pitch-in-and-help brigade, who pay for 
their LiveCode by contributing, bug-hunting and so forth.


2. The Commercial, I-pay-and-I-expect quality brigade, who do not want 
to have to worry their pretty little heads about bugs.


The latter group have just as much right to complain about bugs as the 
former one.


Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Peter Haworth
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 SELECT * FROM sometable;  worked before the change with SQLite.  Now, it
 is necessary to remove the semicolon.


I just tried this using LC 5.5.4 (prior to the SQLite library change) and
LC 6.6.2 (after the SQLite library change), with and without the semicolon
and all tests worked fine.

You mentioned a parsing error - did you mean an LC compile error or an
SQLite error?  Either way, what was the error?


Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Peter Haworth
Can't quite agree with that simplistic analysis.  There are many Commercial
users who test the dp and rc releases, especially if they contain fixes for
bugs they reported.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Richmond richmondmathew...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On 12/11/14 19:50, Bob Sneidar wrote:

 Let me just say that for some folks who do not have enough time to report
 bugs, they certainly have found an abundance of time to post their
 frustrations to this list! Just sayin’.

 Bob S


 ___


 Ooo! Bi*chy :)

 The point that came out of this discussion is that the LiveCode
 'Community' are dividing into two camps:

 1. The Open Source, willing-to-pitch-in-and-help brigade, who pay for
 their LiveCode by contributing, bug-hunting and so forth.

 2. The Commercial, I-pay-and-I-expect quality brigade, who do not want to
 have to worry their pretty little heads about bugs.

 The latter group have just as much right to complain about bugs as the
 former one.

 Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Geoff Canyon
On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Bob Sneidar bobsnei...@iotecdigital.com
wrote:

 Let me just say that for some folks who do not have enough time to report
 bugs, they certainly have found an abundance of time to post their
 frustrations to this list! Just sayin’.


It takes far less time to send an email than it does to file a bug. This
has gotten better with the new bug entry interface -- not sure when that
went in.
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Richard Gaskin

Geoff Canyon wrote:


It takes far less time to send an email than it does to file a bug.


If you just want to type, the difference is negligible.

If you want to actually see the bug fixed, the ROI for filing a bug 
report is much higher. ;)


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Geoff Canyon
Any positive value is higher than zero, so sure. I'm just expressing
frustration about barriers to reporting bugs. For example, a login is
required to file a bug, and the bug submission form all but requires an
example stack. I understand the desire to get clear, actionable bug
reports, and I understand the need to not waste limited team resources on
bad bug reports, but if the requirements are causing Jacque to fail to
report a bug, that's a huge issue.

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 6:35 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

 Geoff Canyon wrote:

  It takes far less time to send an email than it does to file a bug.


 If you just want to type, the difference is negligible.

 If you want to actually see the bug fixed, the ROI for filing a bug report
 is much higher. ;)

 --
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-12 Thread Richmond

WINE has an interesting release model:  https://www.winehq.org/

Every 2 weeks, dead on time, they release another beta version,
and whenever (and 'whenever' can mean anything between 2 weeks to 2 
years) they

release a stable version.

The beta versions are labelled like this: 1.7.1, 1.7.2 and so on.

The stable releases always have an even number in second place, so 1.6, 
1.8 etc.


They advise anybody except for nutty fruitcakes like myself to stick with
the stable releases and explicitly state that they accept NO responsibility
for anything the beta versions may do.

Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richmond

On 11/11/14 21:25, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

I can't help but wonder what it would take to get runrev to follow normal
practice and actually get something to alpha level before calling it a
developer preview, beta by a release candidate (ok, that still wouldn't
be normal), and working rather than early beta before release.

If I sold something at these stages, I'd be out of business by sundown.

Do the developers even pretend to use the IDE before slapping release
candidate on it?  Do they even have some kind of test suite?

The sheer number of pieces of working code that have broken when going from
5.5 to 7.0 is beyond belief, as is the giant step backward in the IDE.

I used to have to kill livecode frequently for the phantom shadow
variable problem.  While that happens more often under 6 (which is why I
could never use it) and 7, I now usually have to kill the whole thing
before that happens, as I can't get it to set a breakpoint, or even
acknowedge that I've clicked anything, delays of several seconds, and so
forth.

In addition to the others I've mentioned here an in other recent posts, the
recompile of sqlite is not quite compatible with the old, and behaves
differently.  For example, a semicolon at the end of an entry without
begin/end transaction now causes a parsing error.

Moving forward is one thing, but the only near release grade version is
5.x, which itself isn't quite ready for primetime.

OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that never
should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.


Dear Dr Hawkins,

I hope RunRev listen to you: they certainly have shown little or no sign 
of listening

when I have stated similar reservations about Stable releases.

As a Mac PPC loony the fact that the 'last' Mac PPC compatible version 
(6.6.5) doesn't have an
icon that shows up is, frankly, pathetic, and easily resolved . . . but 
it hasn't been.


And that, as they say, is the smallest of all the bi*ches there are 
right across the stable releases.


The problem of Unicode fonts being substituted for on past XP Windows 
shows no sign of being resolved, despite

Microsoft having pumped out Vista, 7, 8 and *.1 since then.

Boom, boom, and so it goes . . .

Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:

OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that never
should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.


I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test our 
work with pre-release versions.


The SQLite issue may be more related to the new SQLite code base than 
with LiveCode.  I can't say specifically - Mr. Haworth, what do you find 
with that?


On the other issues, can you share the bug report numbers so we can 
follow them?


--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World Systems
 Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
 
 ambassa...@fourthworld.comhttp://www.FourthWorld.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richmond

On 11/11/14 21:55, Richard Gaskin wrote:

Dr. Hawkins wrote:
OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that 
never

should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.


I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test 
our work with pre-release versions.


That is, of course, very true.

Another idea that might not be bad, is to slow down the releases so 
there is more time for testing.


I would love to do more testing (I do almost none) but do not have the 
time as I have a full work schedule both in terms of my
teaching duties and my programming ones. Given more time between 
releases of development previews, release candidates and stable releases
might allow many of us busy people slightly more time to do this sort of 
thing.


Another idea would be to award brownie points to anyone who identifies 
and documents a bug, and, after somebody has collected

enough points they could receive some sort tangible reward.



The SQLite issue may be more related to the new SQLite code base than 
with LiveCode.  I can't say specifically - Mr. Haworth, what do you 
find with that?


On the other issues, can you share the bug report numbers so we can 
follow them?




Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Rick Harrison
Hi Dr. Hawkins,

The whole computer industry is changing too rapidly now.
Their is no such thing as “stable” as a result.  

What everyone wants is a “stable” OS, a “stable” language, a
“stable” database, and stable hardware platforms to go with it all.

If we had all of that, we’d already have a stable “AI” computer
system.  Instead it’s all becoming an upgrade hell for everyone
except the people who at the top are making money from the
entire circus they’ve created.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for letting all of us vent a little!  LOL

Rick

 On Nov 11, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 I can't help but wonder what it would take to get runrev to follow normal
 practice and actually get something to alpha level before calling it a
 developer preview, beta by a release candidate (ok, that still wouldn't
 be normal), and working rather than early beta before release.
 
 If I sold something at these stages, I'd be out of business by sundown.
 
 Do the developers even pretend to use the IDE before slapping release
 candidate on it?  Do they even have some kind of test suite?
 
 The sheer number of pieces of working code that have broken when going from
 5.5 to 7.0 is beyond belief, as is the giant step backward in the IDE.
 
 I used to have to kill livecode frequently for the phantom shadow
 variable problem.  While that happens more often under 6 (which is why I
 could never use it) and 7, I now usually have to kill the whole thing
 before that happens, as I can't get it to set a breakpoint, or even
 acknowedge that I've clicked anything, delays of several seconds, and so
 forth.
 
 In addition to the others I've mentioned here an in other recent posts, the
 recompile of sqlite is not quite compatible with the old, and behaves
 differently.  For example, a semicolon at the end of an entry without
 begin/end transaction now causes a parsing error.
 
 Moving forward is one thing, but the only near release grade version is
 5.x, which itself isn't quite ready for primetime.
 
 OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that never
 should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.
 -- 
 Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
 (702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
 wrote:

 Dr. Hawkins wrote:

 OK, I'll stop venting, but the amount of time I'm losing to bugs that
 never
 should have seen a public preview is getting increasingly frustrating.


 I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test our
 work with pre-release versions.


Two problems, though:
1) One can *either* stay with 5.5, *or* use any of the new features.
Without maintaining two codebases (impossible with livecode's monolithic
file), there is no way to do both.
2) These prereleases just aren't ready for what they're called and
presented as.  I simply cannot believe that anyone who uses the debugger
would have signed off on it.

I really can't give up any significant portion of my coding time to do
livecode's work for them; these are things that are so basic that they
never should have seen a release to the public.

-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Peter Haworth
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 In addition to the others I've mentioned here an in other recent posts, the
 recompile of sqlite is not quite compatible with the old, and behaves
 differently.  For example, a semicolon at the end of an entry without
 begin/end transaction now causes a parsing error.


I rarely, if ever, try to execute multiple SQL statements in one
revDatabasexxx so haven't seen that particular problem. Could you give an
example? I'd like to check it out as I don't want to get hit by the same
bug.

Thanks,

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Peter Haworth
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
 wrote:

 The SQLite issue may be more related to the new SQLite code base than with
 LiveCode.  I can't say specifically - Mr. Haworth, what do you find with
 that?


Just asked for an example and will check it out.

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Richmond wrote:


On 11/11/14 21:55, Richard Gaskin wrote:

I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test
our work with pre-release versions.


That is, of course, very true.

Another idea that might not be bad, is to slow down the releases so
there is more time for testing.


Agreed.  While v7 did have an unusually long test period as it was 
(first test build was release March 19), there are a couple rough edges 
in the Stable build that seem the sort of thing that might have been 
handled prior to that designation.




I would love to do more testing (I do almost none) but do not have
the time as I have a full work schedule both in terms of my
teaching duties and my programming ones.


True, we can only afford the time we can afford.  Unicode's not very 
critical for my work, so most of my testing was with v6.7, testing v7 
only on Ubuntu and really only focused on the new Linux-specific 
additions there.


But when a given version has new features that seem useful to us, 
testing is critical to ensure that it'll do what we want to it do when 
the final build comes out.


And testing needn't necessarily be all that deep.  LiveCode has a lot 
going on, arguably more akin to an OS than to any consumer app.  We all 
do different things with it, and no one can guess the exact interaction 
of language elements we'll be using in our own scripts.


So while we can't be expected to test everything, if we only test our 
own apps with new builds that's usually all we need for our own work.  
Collectively, if we call just ensured that new features get implemented 
in ways we need, we'll all have what we want.


Rather than thinking about testing LiveCode, big as it is, it may be 
more helpful to think of it as testing you own app's functionality in 
the sliver of LiveCode that it uses.  Just test your own stuff, and your 
own needs will be addressed.



Another idea would be to award brownie points to anyone who 
identifies

and documents a bug, and, after somebody has collected
enough points they could receive some sort tangible reward.


That's a good idea, and one I know Ben is keenly interested in persuing. 
 In fact, he's brought it up in a couple of our Community meetings, but 
maybe you can help us out with some of the details we've been stuck on:


What sorts of perks would you find motivating, and at what level of 
testing effort or bug report count should they kick in?


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richmond

On 11/11/14 22:59, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

snip
I really can't give up any significant portion of my coding time to do 
livecode's work for them; these are things that are so basic that they 
never should have seen a release to the public. 


I'm afraid, Richard Gaskin et al, the above is going to be a fairly 
widespread response.


Obviously Dr Hawkins is not over-enamoured of the Open Source theory: 
LiveCode is paid for in a different way [the I'll scratch your back if 
you'll scratch mine way] than the 'standard' commercial way [I pay you, 
and you do ALL the work].


Part of the problem is that Livecode is NOT like GIMP (for instance): 
GIMP is 100% Open Source, while Livecode both IS and ISN'T Open Source,

and RunRev has to play a terrible balancing act keeping both camps happy.

-

I can see this problem, and have to cope with it frequently in my 'real' 
job.


I run an English as a Foreign Language school in Bulgaria, and have 
constantly to explain to parents that, in spite of the fact they
pay me to teach English to their children, their children will not learn 
anything if only I do any work and the kids do nothing.

One cannot learn English in the same way as a sponge soaks up water.

-

The difference between what I do and LiveCode is also quite important: 
Livecode is a product which can be used [rather like
a car can be used to drive from place to place] without having to 
understand what goes on 'under the hood'. Language learning

means constantly messing around under the hood.

And, quite honestly, if I bought a car and then was supposed to beta 
test the thing and keep going back to buy replacements
every time something went wrong with the car I would get pretty fed up 
pretty quickly.


The reason I don't get fed up is I keep going back and getting free 
replacements, and that is the main difference.


Now what I don't get with the free version is the ability to lock up my 
code so that other people cannot pinch it, and at present that
doesn't fuss me. I can, however, imagine a time when it will matter, so 
I will stump up the money to buy the non-free version.


If, on buying the non-free version and it turns out to be dicky I 
shall be even more trenchant in my response than Dr Hawkins.


-

Of course Dr Hawkins does not really make a distinction between 
'developer previews' and 'release candidates' (which are marked
as such to signal a lower level of confidence in their functional 
completeness than 'stable' versions. He does, however, state
that 'stable' versions are not much better than the others, and that is 
where the problem lies.


Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being swept 
along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no reason 
to change that opinion.


When or if I come to thinking about buying a commercial version of 
LiveCode I will be in a very odd position, not really knowing whether
I am buying a version that is, really, stable, or just something 
beta-ish labelled 'stable' which will then cause all sorts of unforeseen

problems with my product.

Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richmond

On 11/11/14 23:16, Richard Gaskin wrote:

Richmond wrote:


On 11/11/14 21:55, Richard Gaskin wrote:

I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test
our work with pre-release versions.


That is, of course, very true.

Another idea that might not be bad, is to slow down the releases so
there is more time for testing.


Agreed.  While v7 did have an unusually long test period as it was 
(first test build was release March 19), there are a couple rough 
edges in the Stable build that seem the sort of thing that might 
have been handled prior to that designation.




I would love to do more testing (I do almost none) but do not have
the time as I have a full work schedule both in terms of my
teaching duties and my programming ones.


True, we can only afford the time we can afford.  Unicode's not very 
critical for my work, so most of my testing was with v6.7, testing v7 
only on Ubuntu and really only focused on the new Linux-specific 
additions there.


But when a given version has new features that seem useful to us, 
testing is critical to ensure that it'll do what we want to it do when 
the final build comes out.


And testing needn't necessarily be all that deep.  LiveCode has a lot 
going on, arguably more akin to an OS than to any consumer app.  We 
all do different things with it, and no one can guess the exact 
interaction of language elements we'll be using in our own scripts.


So while we can't be expected to test everything, if we only test our 
own apps with new builds that's usually all we need for our own work.  
Collectively, if we call just ensured that new features get 
implemented in ways we need, we'll all have what we want.


Rather than thinking about testing LiveCode, big as it is, it may be 
more helpful to think of it as testing you own app's functionality in 
the sliver of LiveCode that it uses.  Just test your own stuff, and 
your own needs will be addressed.




Another idea would be to award brownie points to anyone who identifies
and documents a bug, and, after somebody has collected
enough points they could receive some sort tangible reward.


That's a good idea, and one I know Ben is keenly interested in 
persuing.  In fact, he's brought it up in a couple of our Community 
meetings, but maybe you can help us out with some of the details we've 
been stuck on:


What sorts of perks would you find motivating, and at what level of 
testing effort or bug report count should they kick in?




How about a series of T-shirts with insects all over them and the 
LiveCode logo: and the words, I've helped squash X bugs. where 'X' is 
a number?


Fairly childish, but fun and effective!

Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/11/2014, 3:16 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

So while we can't be expected to test everything, if we only test our
own apps with new builds that's usually all we need for our own work.
Collectively, if we call just ensured that new features get implemented
in ways we need, we'll all have what we want.


If it's easy to report a bug, I do it. The lack of command key 
functionality for example. I can just describe a procedure to follow. 
Demonstrating a problem with an image redraw is easy and only requires a 
single card with an image and a few lines of script. I jump on that sort 
of thing right away.


What usually stops me is the need to create a separate, stripped-down 
stack to demonstrate a more complicated bug. I completely understand the 
need for this, especially in my case where the original stack is huge 
and complex, and I wouldn't expect RR to plow through all that. But 
extracting the exact set of circumstances that reproduce the problem 
without including all the surrounding code can sometimes be a whole 
afternoon's work or more, so I don't do it. I just hope someone else has 
a simpler example and will report it for me instead.


I know when I do this that I'm not helping myself very much, but there's 
too much going on to do otherwise.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

J. Landman Gay wrote:


What usually stops me is the need to create a separate, stripped-down
stack to demonstrate a more complicated bug. I completely understand
the need for this, especially in my case where the original stack is
huge and complex, and I wouldn't expect RR to plow through all that.
But extracting the exact set of circumstances that reproduce the 
problem

without including all the surrounding code can sometimes be a whole
afternoon's work or more, so I don't do it. I just hope someone else
has a simpler example and will report it for me instead.

I know when I do this that I'm not helping myself very much, but
there's too much going on to do otherwise.


No shame in that, or if there is I'm just shameless 'cause I do that all 
the time.


Like you, I recognize that not pinning down a recipe won't help me get 
it fixed, but like RunRev themselves we all have to balance the desire 
for completely air-tight work with the realities of keeping the doors 
open.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/11/2014, 3:23 PM, Richmond wrote:

Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being swept
along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no reason
to change that opinion.


Suppose while teaching English, you were not paid by the time you put 
in, but rather by the number of students who learn each word. If you 
teach 10 students and they all learn the word, you get paid for 10 words.


If one student does not learn the word, then you must go back and 
re-teach it until the student understands it. You don't get paid for 
his word until that happens.


If 9 of your students learn the word but one does not, would you stop 
introducing new words in class until the one student understands it? Or 
would you re-teach that student on your own time? Or would you just 
postpone it for a while because it affects only one person?


Suppose 6 students don't understand the word. In that case you would 
probably decide to re-teach it during class time because so many 
students are affected. The four remaining students would be idle until 
that is done and may feel you are depriving them of a full education.


Suppose 3 students don't understand it. Where would you draw the line? 
Remember, you get paid by the word.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Vaughn Clement
The student example

Your comment is interesting BUT;

Instructors need to test the curricula before, during and after the
instruction.

The question is, is it the instruction, the testing or the student having
the problem. It all comes back to the testing. The teacher who does not
test the instruction fails. The instruction that is not tested will fail.
The student that is not learning from the instruction fails.

The bottom line, no testing no learning.

This forum is the best source for learning at this time, your comments
allow the students to learn, the teachers You are helping us all to
learn. Lastly you're wasting time  explaining what your not doing. NOT
TESTING!

Thank you

Vaughn Clement

Apps by Vaughn Clement (Support)
*http://www.appsbyvaughnclement.com/tools/home-page/
http://www.appsbyvaughnclement.com/tools/home-page/*
On Target Solutions LLC Website: http://www.ontargetsolutions.biz
Email: ontargetsoluti...@yahoo.com
Skype: vaughn.clement

FaceTime: vclem...@gmail.com
Ph. 928-254-9062


On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 2:53 PM, J. Landman Gay jac...@hyperactivesw.com
wrote:

 On 11/11/2014, 3:23 PM, Richmond wrote:

 Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being swept
 along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
 from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no reason
 to change that opinion.


 Suppose while teaching English, you were not paid by the time you put in,
 but rather by the number of students who learn each word. If you teach 10
 students and they all learn the word, you get paid for 10 words.

 If one student does not learn the word, then you must go back and re-teach
 it until the student understands it. You don't get paid for his word
 until that happens.

 If 9 of your students learn the word but one does not, would you stop
 introducing new words in class until the one student understands it? Or
 would you re-teach that student on your own time? Or would you just
 postpone it for a while because it affects only one person?

 Suppose 6 students don't understand the word. In that case you would
 probably decide to re-teach it during class time because so many students
 are affected. The four remaining students would be idle until that is done
 and may feel you are depriving them of a full education.

 Suppose 3 students don't understand it. Where would you draw the line?
 Remember, you get paid by the word.

 --
 Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
 HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Richmond wrote:


Obviously Dr Hawkins is not over-enamoured of the Open Source
theory: LiveCode is paid for in a different way [the I'll
scratch your back if you'll scratch mine way] than the
'standard' commercial way [I pay you, and you do ALL the work].


I think you and I may be a rare breed.  I know folks in both the 
proprietary and open source worlds who feel the other is the embodiment 
of evil, but I see only an inherent symbiosis in which each side not 
only benefits the other, but perhaps even to the point of mutually 
beneficial dependency.  Where would open source be without support from 
proprietary vendors, and where would those vendors be without the tools 
and infrastructure the open source world provides?  Heck, these days 
both Apple and Microsoft promote Linux - I think it's safe to say both 
worlds can get along well at this point by working together.


With developer tools, the argument for open source is undeniable:  of 
the Top 100 Programming Languages on the TIOBE list, all but a small 
handful from multi-billion-dollar companies are open source.


Since the turn of the century, the range of great tools available under 
open source licenses has exploded.  There's simply no way a smaller 
player like LiveCode could ever hope to make it into the Top 50 without 
at least an open source option.




Part of the problem is that Livecode is NOT like GIMP (for instance):
GIMP is 100% Open Source, while Livecode both IS and ISN'T Open Source,
and RunRev has to play a terrible balancing act keeping both camps 
happy.


This is another of the distinctions between consumer tools and developer 
tools:


As a consumer took, GIMP does well under GPL because it doesn't need to 
support developers building proprietary apps with it.


As a developer tool, LiveCode needs to provide an option for proprietary 
deployment.  And as a complex work, it needs considerable resources to 
be maintained.


The dual-license model used by MySQL and others seems a good fit 
covering both sides.




If, on buying the non-free version and it turns out to be dicky
I shall be even more trenchant in my response than Dr Hawkins.


And perhaps rightly so.

The issue with testing, however, is very different from the decision to 
move from Release Candidate to Stable (in which case it really ought 
to be stable):


With testing, the primary beneficiary is ourselves.

I've been a beta tester for Adobe, Asymetrix, Oracle, Triton, Silicon 
Graphics, Canonical, and others, and I've never been paid nor expected I 
would be.   I did it because the quality of my own work is dependent on 
theirs, and I've been in the business long enough to appreciate how the 
complexity of software requires beta testing.


When I have no serious investment in a tool, I don't bother.  But for 
tools my business relies on, testing them to make sure they do what I 
need has never struck me as anything other that just part of running a 
business that relies on software.


I also do a stress test on new hard drives before I put them into 
production.  And I test drive cars before I buy them.  Just seems like a 
prudent thing to do.




He does, however, state that 'stable' versions are not much better than
the others, and that is where the problem lies.


To a degree I would agree with that.  Obviously a quick review of the 
change logs shows how much effort is expended to fixing show-stoppers 
during the test cycle, but in all fairness to Dr. Hawkins the issue 
Chipp found with the Quit item on Mac is an odd one that one could 
reasonably be assumed would not warrant Stable.


It'll be interesting to hear how that one happened.  I think it's safe 
to say no one at RunRev saw it and said, Nah, good enough, ship it 
anyway.  I'd wager that somehow it never showed up in their daily work 
for some reason, even with their large and growing set of automated 
regression testing tools, and no doubt this issue has been added to that 
suite since.




Several times I have stated that in my opinion RunRev are being
swept along into a sort of feature bloat which prevents them
from sorting out little 'niggles' in existing features. I se no
reason to change that opinion.


Perfectly valid.  We all have our own preferences, and one of the 
reasons I left the dev tools world long ago and have no intention of 
returning to it is that it's full of a great many very smart people who 
can each come up with compelling reasons to need very different things.


Some prefer we aim for a completely bug-free version, holding off all 
new development until that's done.  But there's never been a completely 
bug-free app of this scope in the history of software, and with things 
like Apple's deprecation of QT, their pending deprecation of Carbon, 
Ubuntu's pending deprecation of 32-bit, Windows' ever-changing rendering 
models, and other things in the business environment over which no one 
at RunRev has any control, it's hard for them to come back to us and 
demand we use 

Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

 I rarely, if ever, try to execute multiple SQL statements in one
 revDatabasexxx so haven't seen that particular problem. Could you give an
 example? I'd like to check it out as I don't want to get hit by the same
 bug.


I routinely execute many synchronize with the remote, as latency is a big
deal and stops the single-threaded livecode.

SELECT * FROM sometable;  worked before the change with SQLite.  Now, it
is necessary to remove the semicolon.

I routinely code the semicolons in because I variously use both direct
revDatabaseXxxx  calls and my own routine which wraps with Begin/End.  That
way, I can, err, could, simply write my queries.


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

 Dr. Hawkins wrote:

  On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

 I agree, which is why it benefits no one more than ourselves to test our
 work with pre-release versions.


 Two problems, though:
 1) One can *either* stay with 5.5, *or* use any of the new features.
 Without maintaining two codebases (impossible with livecode's monolithic
 file), there is no way to do both.
 2) These prereleases just aren't ready for what they're called and
 presented as.  I simply cannot believe that anyone who uses the debugger
 would have signed off on it.


 I'd like to raise these concerns with Ben and Kevin at my next meeting.
 It would be very helpful if you could point me to the bug reports that
 describe these issues.


That's the problem.  These are at a level that never should have seen the
outside to be reported as bugs.

That something unusual happens under certain circumstances is a bug.  That
the IDE window regularly pauses for seconds at a time, or stops taking
input, is impossible to not notice if you actually use it.

This is a commercial product that was released without testing; *that* the
paying customers are expected to file bug reports over what should have
been done before is the fundamental problem.

I have, however, added bugs 13997-9 about the failures of the checkpoints
in the IDE
-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Richmond richmondmathew...@gmail.com
wrote:


 Obviously Dr Hawkins is not over-enamoured of the Open Source theory:
 LiveCode is paid for in a different way [the I'll scratch your back if
 you'll scratch mine way] than the 'standard' commercial way [I pay you,
 and you do ALL the work].


Actually, I published the seminal paper on the economics of open source
software, and am quite familiar with it.

I purchased a $1k/year commercial license before the kickstarter campaign,
and have never used the community version (and given the GPL3, probably
never will, at least not until there are US court cases).

While I'm at it, instead of the you get the same license on the
kickstarter campaign, I ended up with the newer, subscription license.  But
that's a whole separate issue.

When I'm paying for a license, I expect things to generally work, not to be
test cases.



 Of course Dr Hawkins does not really make a distinction between 'developer
 previews' and 'release candidates' (which are marked
 as such to signal a lower level of confidence in their functional
 completeness than 'stable' versions. He does, however, state
 that 'stable' versions are not much better than the others, and that is
 where the problem lies.


Sure I do; but each is inflated.

Normal parlance is that an alpha release executes, a beta release is
feature complete and generally works but with bugs expected to be found,
and that a release has been tested.

LiveCode's developer previews simply execue (nightly snapshot that
executed), the RC are alpha quality, the 5.5 series are late beta, and the
6.x and 7.x releases are early beta.

When or if I come to thinking about buying a commercial version of LiveCode
 I will be in a very odd position, not really knowing whether
 I am buying a version that is, really, stable, or just something beta-ish
 labelled 'stable' which will then cause all sorts of unforeseen
 problems with my product.


My attitude would probably be far different if I were using a community
version . . . I understand the open source and mixed models quite well, but
would be far better off with a fixed and working 5 than what the efforts
have been spent on the last couple of years.

-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:


On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
I'd like to raise these concerns with Ben and Kevin at my next 
meeting.

It would be very helpful if you could point me to the bug reports that
describe these issues.


That's the problem.  These are at a level that never should have seen
the outside to be reported as bugs.


Hard to say without knowing what the specific issue is.

Peter's investigating the SQLite issue (thanks, Peter), and that may be 
a regression in LiveCode or it may be a change in SQLite itself.  There 
are many changes logged for SQLite in recent builds, so hopefully 
Peter's analysis will help shed some light on that.


Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth 
looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd 
need to know what they are.




That something unusual happens under certain circumstances is a bug.
That the IDE window regularly pauses for seconds at a time, or stops
taking input, is impossible to not notice if you actually use it.


Have you considered the possibility that things your app uses regularly 
may not be used as often by others?




This is a commercial product that was released without testing;


I think the hundreds of testers who put in thousands of hours testing 
over the last 8 months would disagree.




*that* the paying customers are expected to file bug reports over what
should have been done before is the fundamental problem.


No one's obliged to test.  If having bugs fixed isn't of interest, 
there's no need to let anyone know when you find them.


If you prefer to wait until after release to find out if a build will 
suit your app's needs, any issues you find will, by definition, be 
post-release, and can only be addressed in yet another build later in 
the future.


It's a choice we make with complete freedom, with any software, or any 
product, according to our own needs for such assessment.


I never bother reporting bugs for software I don't rely on.  But I never 
buy a car without driving it several miles first.



I have, however, added bugs 13997-9 about the failures of the 
checkpoints

in the IDE


I saw that - thanks for filing the report.  I'm sure by now you got 
notice that the lead engineer began researching it within 48 hours after 
you'd submitted it.


I suspect this will soon join the other 1,700 reported issues that were 
fixed over the last year, now that it's been brought to their attention.


This particular bug makes a good case study for the nature of testing in 
all software, whether it's LiveCode, or our own, or Apple's, or anyone 
else's:


A given issue may seem obvious if it's something your app uses 
regularly, but it's worth noting that after 8 months of testing by 
hundreds of community members in addition to internal resources both 
human and automated at RunRev, this issue had never before been 
reported.  I'd never seen it, nor heard anyone mention anything like it. 
 And eight months is a long time.


This is one of the tricky things about complex systems:  with so many 
thousands of tokens that can be combined and recombined in nearly 
infinite variety, the likelihood that the specific intersection of 
features a given app needs will be easily found by others simply can't 
be assured.


If you want to use a new version, it can help you get any issues that 
need resolving done before release if you choose to try the pre-release 
builds.


No one's required to test.  But many of us choose to do so because it 
benefits our own goals.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

 Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth
 looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd need
 to know what they are.


That the IDE doesn't work?

I filed those bugs, but can anyone really have used the IDE and breakpoints
without noticing the hangs, and the inability to set these?

And how many years has it been since a current version can watch a global
variable without crashing? or the false failures to compile over shadowed
names?

If I spend a day programming, I have to kill livecode a dozen or more times.


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread William Prothero
Folks:
Just to chime in on this. I’ve been using version 7.0 for a couple of months. 
No problems. I’m not using many of the new features like unicode, but have 
found the IDE working fine for my purposes, so far. The slowdown in some 
operations has affected me, though. Picking out a byte from a large byte array 
is slower than older versions.

That said, I’m glad you guys are finding the bugs in features I don’t use, 
because eventually, I will use them.
Best,
Bill

William A. Prothero
http://es.earthednet.org/

On Nov 11, 2014, at 4:46 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
 wrote:
 
 Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth
 looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd need
 to know what they are.
 
 
 That the IDE doesn't work?
 

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Alejandro Tejada
Hi Richard,

on Tue, 11 Nov 2014
Richard Gaskin wrote:

[snip]
 On the other issues, can you share the
 bug report numbers so we can follow them?

Does exist an automatic way to post
every new bug report in this mail  list?

Could bugzilla do this?
In this way, every bug will be noticed and
reviewed by all mail list users.

Al
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:


On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:


Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth
looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd 
need

to know what they are.



That the IDE doesn't work?


I'll run a search for IDE doesn't work and see what I can come up 
with. ;)



I filed those bugs, but can anyone really have used the IDE and 
breakpoints

without noticing the hangs, and the inability to set these?


Thanks for noting which bugs were concerning you.

The one I had referred to was about the card reference, which has 
already been fixed:

http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13972


For those following this the breakpoint bugs are:
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13997
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13998
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13999

I did a quick triage on those:

The first one ('97) was especially interesting because in all the years 
I'd been using LC I'd never used that particular feature.  The 
description of that feature on p68 of the User Guide does seem to match 
your expectations, and I was able to confirm your report.


The second one ('98) was one that could benefit from others here who've 
used the debugger more than I have (Jacque, that means you g).  I'm 
not sure if it's a bug or merely needs more explanation in the docs.


The last one ('99) I was unable to reproduce, but if there are any 
additional steps I can follow to reliably reproduce I'd be happy to 
submit my notes there.



And how many years has it been since a current version can watch a 
global
variable without crashing? or the false failures to compile over 
shadowed

names?


Bug #s?

Anyone else experience those?

There was a recent comment about shadowed name warnings in the Facebook 
group recently, but that seemed related to turning on the feature to 
warn about those (Prefs - Script Editor - Strict Compilation Mode).  
The person who noted the issue reported back that after restoring that 
feature to its default off setting he was happy.  Is that not working 
for you?


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Mark Talluto
On Nov 11, 2014, at 4:38 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com wrote:

 Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth 
 looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd need to 
 know what they are.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for taking this on.  These are stopping us from using 7 either in 
shipping applications and in some cases development:

Move command renders graphics improperly when screen has been recently locked
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13961

Player object should be able to transform video content
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13942
(We are currently relying on Trevor’s excellent QT External for this.  Thus, 
this is really an enhancement.)

Color overlay doesn't seem to be applied to alpha channel correctly
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11520

(Fixed but not released) Command keys not working correctly
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13847

This list does not include a serial port communication bug. The general issue 
is that serial communication is very slow.  We rely on serial communication for 
our remote control system to communicate with the vision testing software. Just 
need to find the time to build a recipe stack this one.

The overall slowness of 7 is also an issue.  Thankfully plenty of benchmarking 
scripts are being created by the wonderful people on this list to show those 
issues. I personally think there should be more life applied to the 6.7 cycle. 
This will be important until 7 matures. 

A quick glance at which engine is used for some of our applications:
Live Events Conference App: 6.6.3
20/20 Vision Testing Software: 6.1.1
LiveCloud Servers: 6.6.5
LiveCloud Manager: 6.5.1
Electronic Medical Records (under development): Shooting for 6.7

You might ask yourself why we are using such a range of engines.  Why not use 
the latest or why not use only one or two?  Selecting the right engine depends 
on a number of factors like: Is this for mobile or desktop.  Then there are 
sub-factors like: Media playback features needed, serial port access, graphic 
overlay use, text manipulation, array features, and various bug fixes that 
affect your particular app. These are just the ones that come to mind.

Best regards,

Mark Talluto
livecloud.io
canelasoftware.com
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Mark Talluto
On Nov 11, 2014, at 5:24 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com wrote:

 There was a recent comment about shadowed name warnings in the Facebook group 
 recently, but that seemed related to turning on the feature to warn about 
 those (Prefs - Script Editor - Strict Compilation Mode).  The person who 
 noted the issue reported back that after restoring that feature to its 
 default off setting he was happy.  Is that not working for you?


I have seen this one too.  My quick enough work around is copy the script to 
memory.  Empty the script from the control that is complaining and compile.  
Then paste the script back into the control. The true issue will properly error 
at the bottom of the script editor. Fix that issue and compile again. 
Everything goes back to normal.


Best regards,

Mark Talluto
livecloud.io
canelasoftware.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Terry Judd
On 12/11/2014 11:00 am, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

LiveCode's developer previews simply execue (nightly snapshot that
executed), the RC are alpha quality, the 5.5 series are late beta, and the
6.x and 7.x releases are early beta.

I think that¹s a bit harsh. There are problems with every version but
typically only a very small number effect individual users. Like many
others I move to a newer version when a new feature that I want has been
added or a bug that is holding me back gets fixed. If other problems
emerge then I step back and monitor things for a bit longer. I don¹t
really care how a release is named, alpha, beta, DP or RC - if it does
enough of what I want then I use it.

When or if I come to thinking about buying a commercial version of
LiveCode
I will be in a very odd position, not really knowing whether
I am buying a version that is, really, stable, or just something beta-ish
labelled 'stable' which will then cause all sorts of unforeseen
problems with my product.


My attitude would probably be far different if I were using a community
version . . . I understand the open source and mixed models quite well,
but
would be far better off with a fixed and working 5 than what the efforts
have been spent on the last couple of years.

I guess it depends on what you want the software to do. While things move
relatively slowly in the desktop world, mobile OSes are changing rapidly.
A stable version 5 would be fairly useless to an iOS developer. I like the
fact that LC is evolving - warts and all. If the alternative is what used
to happen with Director (maybe still does), where Œstable¹ versions go
unchanged for years, then I¹ll go for the LC model every time.

Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree that it is annoying when you
regularly butt up against bugs - old and new - and it would be good to get
some useful info on these in an accessible and easily digestible format -
that is, other than via the release notes and the bug database. Perhaps if
these could be aggregated in some way and added as a Œknown issues¹ item
to LC¹s help menu it would be easier for us to decide which version of LC
to use and when to make the switch. The identification/verification of
major new issues against a version (or multiple versions) or fixes in
newly released versions could also perhaps appear as notifications in LC's
start centre.

Terry...


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

 Dr. Hawkins wrote:

  On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

  Any other specific issues you feel are show-stoppers may well be worth
 looking into, and I'd be happy to help if I can.  But to do that I'd need
 to know what they are.


 That the IDE doesn't work?


 I'll run a search for IDE doesn't work and see what I can come up with.
 ;)


:)




 For those following this the breakpoint bugs are:
 http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13997
 http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13998
 http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13999

 I did a quick triage on those:

 The first one ('97) was especially interesting because in all the years
 I'd been using LC I'd never used that particular feature.  The description
 of that feature on p68 of the User Guide does seem to match your
 expectations, and I was able to confirm your report.


The only reason *I* found it (the feature) was that I was trying to set
breakpoints, and my usual ways didn't work.


 The second one ('98) was one that could benefit from others here who've
 used the debugger more than I have (Jacque, that means you g).  I'm not
 sure if it's a bug or merely needs more explanation in the docs.


I suspect it may need someone running livecode itself in another debugger,
or massive checkpoint dumping in the IDE code.


 The last one ('99) I was unable to reproduce, but if there are any
 additional steps I can follow to reliably reproduce I'd be happy to submit
 my notes there.


It seems to be some level of corruption that survives saving and reloading.




  And how many years has it been since a current version can watch a global
 variable without crashing? or the false failures to compile over shadowed
 names?


 Bug #s?

 Anyone else experience those?


These get discussed here every few months.


 There was a recent comment about shadowed name warnings in the Facebook
 group recently, but that seemed related to turning on the feature to warn
 about those (Prefs - Script Editor - Strict Compilation Mode).  The
 person who noted the issue reported back that after restoring that feature
 to its default off setting he was happy.  Is that not working for you?


!!!

No, not having strict compilation can't make me happy; I depend upon such
things.  (I don't even like the lack of case sensitivity in names, or the
inability to apply types, but those only bite on the database side, and I
have scripts that watch my stacks for those on every build.
-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:31 PM, Terry Judd terry.j...@unimelb.edu.au
wrote:

 On 12/11/2014 11:00 am, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 LiveCode's developer previews simply execue (nightly snapshot that
 executed), the RC are alpha quality, the 5.5 series are late beta, and the
 6.x and 7.x releases are early beta.

 I think that¹s a bit harsh.


*shrug*   That's the normal meaning of alpha  beta (for non-microsoft
products)



-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Peter Haworth
OK, I'll try with and without multiple statements in both versions.

I do want to double check that you're not trying to access an SQLite
database over a network because you WILL have major problems if you are :-)

Pete
lcSQL Software http://www.lcsql.com
Home of lcStackBrowser http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html and
SQLiteAdmin http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Dr. Hawkins doch...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

  I rarely, if ever, try to execute multiple SQL statements in one
  revDatabasexxx so haven't seen that particular problem. Could you give an
  example? I'd like to check it out as I don't want to get hit by the same
  bug.
 

 I routinely execute many synchronize with the remote, as latency is a big
 deal and stops the single-threaded livecode.

 SELECT * FROM sometable;  worked before the change with SQLite.  Now, it
 is necessary to remove the semicolon.

 I routinely code the semicolons in because I variously use both direct
 revDatabaseXxxx  calls and my own routine which wraps with Begin/End.  That
 way, I can, err, could, simply write my queries.


 --
 Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
 (702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Mark Talluto wrote:

Thanks for taking this on.  These are stopping us from using 7 either 
in shipping

applications and in some cases development:

Move command renders graphics improperly when screen has been recently 
locked

http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13961

Player object should be able to transform video content
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13942
(We are currently relying on Trevor’s excellent QT External for this.  
Thus, this

is really an enhancement.)

Color overlay doesn't seem to be applied to alpha channel correctly
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11520

(Fixed but not released) Command keys not working correctly
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13847

This list does not include a serial port communication bug. The general
issue is that serial communication is very slow.  We rely on serial
communication for our remote control system to communicate with the 
vision
testing software. Just need to find the time to build a recipe stack 
this one.


The overall slowness of 7 is also an issue.  Thankfully plenty of 
benchmarking
scripts are being created by the wonderful people on this list to show 
those
issues. I personally think there should be more life applied to the 6.7 
cycle.

This will be important until 7 matures.


Very helpful - thanks for posting that list.  I've added them to my 
notes for my next Community meeting with them.


The fixed item is good to see, but of course it would have been better 
to see it fixed before release.  Do you happen to know offhand if that 
was a late-stage regression?


The enhancement request seems very useful, though of course it'll likely 
play a minimal role in a discussion of show-stoppers.


The other two are interesting, and I look forward to learning the 
challenges behind those.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
The first one ('97) was especially interesting because in all the 
years
I'd been using LC I'd never used that particular feature.  The 
description

of that feature on p68 of the User Guide does seem to match your
expectations, and I was able to confirm your report.


The only reason *I* found it (the feature) was that I was trying to set
breakpoints, and my usual ways didn't work.


I've always just clicked om the line number.  I know you've reported an 
issue doing that while the script is running, but are you also unable to 
set the breakpoints by clicking the line number at all?


There was a recent comment about shadowed name warnings in the 
Facebook
group recently, but that seemed related to turning on the feature to 
warn

about those (Prefs - Script Editor - Strict Compilation Mode).  The
person who noted the issue reported back that after restoring that 
feature
to its default off setting he was happy.  Is that not working for 
you?


!!!

No, not having strict compilation can't make me happy; I depend upon
such things.  (I don't even like the lack of case sensitivity in names,
or the inability to apply types, but those only bite on the database 
side,

and I have scripts that watch my stacks for those on every build.


It seems I had misunderstood.  What's the bug report number for that 
one?


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Peter Haworth p...@lcsql.com wrote:

 OK, I'll try with and without multiple statements in both versions.


Now, to make matters worse, it appears that I've been using 7.0.0, not
7.0.1-RC-1 for an unknown period of time--it has managed to set itself as
the default version more than once on this machine.

Anyway, where this bit me was the single transaction with semicolon but
without begin/end



 I do want to double check that you're not trying to access an SQLite
 database over a network because you WILL have major problems if you are :-)


Been, there, done that, silkscreened the t-shirt.  Interestingly, though,
when simultaneously opened, come of the changes could be read by the other
(come to think of it, it wasn't network, but two instances on the same
machine).

But, no, these are actually :memory: SQLite dbs. (now, I'm *dying* for
multi-threading so that the second/slave process can handle synchronization)

-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Dr. Hawkins
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Richard Gaskin ambassa...@fourthworld.com
wrote:

 Dr. Hawkins wrote:

 On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

 The first one ('97) was especially interesting because in all the years
 I'd been using LC I'd never used that particular feature.  The
 description
 of that feature on p68 of the User Guide does seem to match your
 expectations, and I was able to confirm your report.


 The only reason *I* found it (the feature) was that I was trying to set
 breakpoints, and my usual ways didn't work.


 I've always just clicked om the line number.  I know you've reported an
 issue doing that while the script is running, but are you also unable to
 set the breakpoints by clicking the line number at all?


I filed that as a separate bug.  Yes, once it's corrupted enough, it
ignores line-number clicking, which is why I discovered the other.  I
experimented, and foudn it.



  There was a recent comment about shadowed name warnings in the Facebook
 group recently, but that seemed related to turning on the feature to warn
 about those (Prefs - Script Editor - Strict Compilation Mode).  The
 person who noted the issue reported back that after restoring that
 feature
 to its default off setting he was happy.  Is that not working for you?


 !!!

 No, not having strict compilation can't make me happy; I depend upon
 such things.  (I don't even like the lack of case sensitivity in names,
 or the inability to apply types, but those only bite on the database side,
 and I have scripts that watch my stacks for those on every build.


 It seems I had misunderstood.  What's the bug report number for that one?


To start with, Peter Hayworth filed *Bug 10511*
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10511 in 2006  . . . but wee
discuss this every three or fourt months on this list.



-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462
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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:


Now, to make matters worse, it appears that I've been using 7.0.0,
not 7.0.1-RC-1 for an unknown period of time--it has managed to
set itself as the default version more than once on this machine.


If that's on a Mac, I don't believe there's anything a developer can do 
- that's a long-standing Finder feature, in which it uses rules known 
only to itself to determine which version to launch whenever a 
compatible file is double-clicked.


For greater control over app versions I put all the ones I use in my 
Dock and launch them explicitly from there.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richard Gaskin

Dr. Hawkins wrote:


To start with, Peter Hayworth filed *Bug 10511*
http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10511 in 2006
 . . . but wee discuss this every three or fourt months on
this list.


I recall only vague descriptions with no clear outcome, and that 
amazingly long bug report evidences why.


Apparently after a very long period of some of the best minds at RunRev 
and within this community exploring the issue from every angle, only 
fairly recently did a seemingly reliable recipe emerge, but with Peter's 
most recent note there it appears the root cause remains as the recipe.


Many thanks to Peter, Ralph, Monte, and the others who contributed to 
that. Good reading about thorough diagnostic process in the face of a 
problem that for most had been unpredictably intermittent.


Hopefully this can be worked out.  Interesting problem.

--
 Richard Gaskin
 LiveCode Community Manager
 rich...@livecode.org

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Terry Judd
For greater control over app versions I put all the ones I use in my
Dock and launch them explicitly from there.

I¹m sure you¹re not alone there. I have six versions of LC in my dock that
I use for different projects and for testing. I have many more than that
in my Applications folder.

Terry...


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread Richmond

On 12/11/14 07:46, Terry Judd wrote:

For greater control over app versions I put all the ones I use in my
Dock and launch them explicitly from there.

I¹m sure you¹re not alone there. I have six versions of LC in my dock that
I use for different projects and for testing. I have many more than that
in my Applications folder.

Terry...





I have 13 versions along the 'dock' on my Ubuntu Studio machine, all with
differently coloured icons, as I develop my language tools with 4.5 and 
my educational in-house stuff with

anything Open Source.

And several versions of MetaCard.

I have every version (dp, rc, gm, stable) since the first Open Source 
release installed as I am just too

lazy to take the time to remove anything.

SO, I NEVER double-click on a .rev, .mc or .livecode file as that would 
be like playing Russian roulette.


Richmond.

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/11/2014, 7:24 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

The second one ('98) was one that could benefit from others here who've
used the debugger more than I have (Jacque, that means you g).  I'm
not sure if it's a bug or merely needs more explanation in the docs.


For reference: http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13998

I added a comment there. It is quite possible (and convenient!) to add a 
breakpoint while debugging, I do it all the time. But I have never 
right-clicked, I always just left-click normally on a line number and it 
works. I just tested it again in 7.0.1 rc 1 and it still works here.


The next bug (13999) mentions a popup that should appear when 
right-clicking a line number. I don't see one in 6.x either, and I'm not 
sure I remember ever seeing it, though it vaguely rings a bell. That 
said, right-clicking on an existing and active breakpoint *does* put up 
the expected popup, the one that gives you debugging options. So I don't 
see any problems here.


I don't know if the removal of the line-number popup was intentional or 
even if I'm remembering it correctly. I may be thinking of the popup 
that appears in the Breakpoints pane when you right-click. That one 
still works in 7.0.


The last bug (13999) mentions a greyed-out breakpoint and a lack of 
responsiveness in the script editor. A breakpoint will be grey if its 
script has been edited but not recompiled yet. Since saving a stack will 
also save any uncompiled scripts, the grey breakpoint and a confused 
editor will persist across relaunches.


An unresponsive IDE was mentioned. The editor and the IDE can both 
become frozen if you are debugging and you try to do something else 
without exiting debug mode. Not only can you not type into the editor, 
which is to be expected, but most of your stack and even the IDE won't 
respond either (though the message box still works, and the app 
browser.) Almost everything else just stops and you are in a state of 
suspension while the engine waits for debugging to finish. The solution 
is to hit the blue square to stop debugging, or to hit the Run button to 
execute the rest of the handler, and everything picks up again. I've 
never seen the IDE freeze up outside of that situation.


We used to get questions in the support queue about that. People didn't 
realize they were still in debug mode.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/11/2014, 11:46 PM, Terry Judd wrote:

For greater control over app versions I put all the ones I use in my
Dock and launch them explicitly from there.


I¹m sure you¹re not alone there. I have six versions of LC in my dock that
I use for different projects and for testing. I have many more than that
in my Applications folder.


I've only got four in the dock and maybe a dozen in Applications. Have 
you seen screenshots of the RR team's dock? They must have twenty in 
there. :)


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com


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Re: hair-pulling frustration

2014-11-11 Thread J. Landman Gay

On 11/12/2014, 1:15 AM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

That said, right-clicking on an existing and active breakpoint *does*
put up the expected popup, the one that gives you debugging options. So
I don't see any problems here.


I take that back, I didn't test far enough. The popup appears and the 
dialog is put up, but clicking OK after entering a line number does 
nothing. So yeah, this is a bug.


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software   | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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