When the project was still under Bernhard’s rule, he was always going to release only versions that had passed his test plan. I hope to break this tradition soon and release more often and release earlier. My goal is to put all of the code-base under a testing harness that will allow me to verify and validate much of the functionality without too much manual interaction required. This means you will see unstable versions tagged as “alpha”, “beta” or “RC” (release candidate) as well as stable releases. It is on you to decide whether you want to contribute to the development by testing any of the unstable versions, or whether you want to stick with the stable releases only.
Please note that I will follow these guidelines:
- alpha (may become a weekly or nightly build) is a very early version of a future release. Neither is it guaranteed to work properly, nor at all on your machine. Also, new features in such a version may be unstable. As an example, a saved scan may not be loadable in a “beta” or a stable release of this version.
- beta means that the version is reasonably stable. Features available in a beta may disappear in the stable release, or change considerably.
- release candidate (RC) is a version of the software that has the full set of features (“feature-frozen”) of the anticipated next stable release. One of the RCs will eventually become the actual stable release if no bugs/issues have been reported within a certain time frame.
- stable releases are what you already know from WinDirStat.
// Oliver
PS: Once I am done with the migration of the translations to XML (see previous post), I will release a first alpha version that has the multi-selection feature activated. It will also have an optional online update-check. Before a beta I want to include an improved mouse-navigation as well as a save/load feature to save time and not having to re-scan a directory structure every time. I personally also liked the proposed ignore feature.