[News] MediaPortal 1 Development - get involved! (1 Viewer)

[messo001]

Remember this is for people who want to help, and have means to setup and test outside of a production machine, no one wants to screw up a working MP install that a user relies on.

More people testing something, the higher likely hood of coming across a scenario where a fault shows up.

This is voluntary, not compulsory

You are absolutely right and I agree that the more people get involved in pre-release software, the better it eventually becomes. However, fragmenting installers and testing just small aspects of MP makes little sense. My point was to highlight that making a small number of pre-release (e.g. alpha) and pre-pre-release (e.g. pre-alpha) builds available on a frequent basis will make better use of community support.

 

[infinite.loop]

However, fragmenting installers and testing just small aspects of MP makes little sense.

I am sorry, but this makes perfect sense.

In the past we had one bug/rework/feature delaying an MP release for 6+ months! This means that quite a few developers where sitting on their hands because the problem was in an area they had no idea about (i.e. SkinEngine), and due to the featurefreeze they could not work on anything else.

By working in branches, we can fully test each change before it is added to the master/release. This means a change which has not been fully tested and approved will not get into the master anymore.
Also developers can now work on their feature/bugfix/rework without being stalled by a featurefreeze that is active on the master.

Yes, testing is more work. But in the end the stability and the overall development workflow/speed of MP highly benefits from this development model.

Later on there will also be builds of the master (pre-alpha 1.3.0, pre-beta 1.3.0, pre-rc 1.3.0).
But first the work in the branches must be finished before they can be merged with the master.

This is how we work.