I'm totally in for frequent release cycles! Currently it seems to be
like some enterprise application :/

Also, incorporating (some or most of ) Ethan's changes into Watir
would make sense also. I don't believe that it's not possible to chunk
those changes into smaller parts even if they're changing core.

Ethan, could you explain why you've stated something like that before?
I mean, you didn't fork Watir and then work one year in a row and then
made one gigantic commit with all files changed-added-deleted, did
you? Any other reasons why you've stated something like that before?

Jarmo

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Charley Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
> That's a good way to sum it up, and exactly right. It's definitely a
> different task to try to support current users, deprecating features
> and making slow headway. Technical inconsistency is in an interesting
> bit; one of the reasons Watir is and always has in my mind been about
> the api, is similar in intention to something like Cucumber or even
> RSpec, over Test::Unit.
>
> Our users and our audience straddles roles from newbie tester to
> developer, but the primary focus is on ease of use for the general
> tester. I've actually had to back off the list a few times, since
> while I consider myself a patient person, it can be a bit challenging
> to work with people who don't seem to help themselves - google,
> previous postings, bug reports or complaints from QA people who should
> at least understand the basics of reproducible reports.
>
> I would like to work on getting some of the features from Vapir in for
> the current 1.x codebase, if we can manage to extricate some of it,
> and then ongoing we can talk about additional features.
>
>  We also need to get a new release out very soon with activesupport
> removed, dependency gone and all the current fixes. More of a bug fix
> although we have a lot of new code in the base. We need to talk about
> a quick release with a lot of changes, and then the roadmap for
> additional changes. I realize we can pick and pull from commits, but
> personally I'd rather we include that in the upcoming release and get
> on a more regular release schedule.
>
>  A regular release schedule based on semantic versioning, means we
> should be able to release fairly often, with the impending quick
> release which shouldn't break anything for backwards compatibility, so
> I'd suggest 1.6.6, with 1.6.7 and possibly 1.7.0 coming soon. I'd like
> to set this one up as the first gem prerelease, and get some feedback
> so we can start to incorporate that into a more continuous release
> cycle.
>
>  I'd like to release a pre of 1.6.6 before the week is out. Anyone in favor?
>
> Charley Baker
> Lead Developer, Watir, http://watir.com
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Bret Pettichord <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It seems to me that the reason the Vapir forks exists is because Ethan has
>> valued a consistent, logical API over compatible support for legacy users
>> and testsuites whereas the Watir team has been extremely reluctant to
>> disrupt legacy users even if that means that our API is less consistent from
>> a strictly engineering perspective.
>>
>> Another way of saying this is that we don't really treat technical
>> inconsistency (which can often create complications for Watir developers) as
>> a problem until users complain about the inconsistency. A good example of
>> this is zero-based indexing, which many users have complained about.
>>
>> Another Watir principle has been to try to present an API that maps to
>> casual user's models of a web page, even if that means that it doesn't
>> exactly map to the DOM. For example, there are several ways to include
>> buttons in HTML. Watir provides a single API to any of them, where as more
>> DOM-focused tools (e.g. Hpricot) require users to be more technically
>> accurate.
>>
>> Bret
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Ethan <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> It is true that you can have the second part without the first, indeed, I
>>> already have the second part without the first (as does watir-webdriver),
>>> and thinking about that led me to consider deprecating :index.
>>> True, it will annoy people, but that's always true with API changes - just
>>> a question of whether the benefits outweigh the annoyance. I think you end
>>> up with a better API (specifying index as a subscript is more ruby-like and
>>> doesn't conflate :index with other attributes), and cleaner backend code. I
>>> think it's worth it. But, this is sort of far out thinking, along the lines
>>> of deprecating 1-indexing - I wouldn't plan on dropping support for quite
>>> some time, not until the next major version, at some point significantly in
>>> the future.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 09:50, Alan Baird <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My .02 -
>>>> The first part of the proposal, deprecating :index, is
>>>> an unnecessary reduction in functionality and breaks backwards
>>>> compatibility.  It would be a pain to update.
>>>> The second part of the proposal, adding locators to collections, would be
>>>> a cool feature to have.  Of course, you can always use Ruby's select or
>>>> reject iterator to accomplish this, it's just more wordy.
>>>> I don't see what deprecating this usage gets you other than annoying
>>>> Watir's users.  Seems like you could do the 2nd part without the first.
>>>> Alan
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Bret Pettichord
>> Lead Developer, Watir, www.watir.com
>>
>> Blog, www.io.com/~wazmo/blog
>> Twitter, www.twitter.com/bpettichord
>>
>>
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