[sword-devel] beta module repo -- a rant

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Today, someone came into #xiphos to say that Daily (Jonathan Bagster's
Daily Light on the Daily Path) was both displaying oddly and causing
hangs in latest Xiphos.  We poked around a while, coming to no sure
conclusion because what I saw was clearly not what he saw.

Then I realized he had an old version, 1.0, while I have 1.6.  And then
it was further discovered that 1.6 is available in Beta, not in
CrossWire main.  Regular folks don't go poking around in Beta much.

Beta repo's Daily has been sitting there, waiting to go to main, since
February 2010.  That's /5//years/.  Well, anyway, that's the date on
most of mods.d/* there.  Who knows when it last actually changed.  Maybe
5 years before that, for all I know.

The fellow upgraded Daily and /poof/ no more problem.  He said it looks
very different, and the set of verse citations has changed.

Some time back, I found myself wandering around
http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/Modules_in_the_beta_repository

What exactly is the point of having a beta repo?

On this page, there are reporting dates back as far as 2007, without
further updates.  That's pushing /8 years ago/.  A bunch are marked
"known bad, do not test," as of 2007, 2008, or 2010.  Well, what are
they still around for, if they're "known bad" and nothing can be
expected ever to change that state?

There is one comment in all of 2011...and that's the most recent
anywhere on the page.  One in 2010.  A small pile in 2009.  By far, most
are in 2008.

The level of commentary on display quality consists of e.g. "Displays
well in GS, BD, MS, SW" when Xiphos hasn't been GnomeSword since 2009
(/6 years/) and Eloquent hasn't been MacSword in roughly that long as well.

Tisch has a notation that John 8:53 is broken, so I looked at my copy:
Yup, verse numbering skips from 11 to a gigantic 53 with no intervening
12-52, and yet this notation is /6 years old/ with no evident progress
toward making Tisch correct.  And by the way, Tisch is based on v2.5 of
the text; by comparison, my TischMorph is built from v2.7 of the same
text, and it's lovely and available in Xiphos repo.

4 out of 5 Japanese Bibles are noted, "hold for 1.6.2 testing" and yet
we've got 1.7.3 or .4 released.

The page as a whole hasn't seen a significant change in 3 years.

Seriously, what's the point?  What does it mean to be "beta" if there is
never movement away from that state, either toward release or toward
deliberate abandonment?

Release them to main or kill them outright.  Purgatory is bad doctrine.
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