Well, why could we not live with DX8 / DX9 breakage for some time ? At the time D3D was resurected, it was broken for most of the time (and probably still is :-) ).
And if someone disappears from development, it's just more motivations for others to pick up the work and continue (which would be more problematic with branches as this branch, if unmaintained, could really wither away without anyone working on it).
Yes, this is true. But I think this isn't the direction we want to go in.
At *some* point we have to stop simply releasing CVS snapshots which may or may not work/run important apps/eat your hard disk and actually do proper releases that are, you know, tested'n'stuff.
Trivial example that's causing people problems today: apparently winecfg eats your drive configuration. People install wine, encounter this suggestively named "winecfg" program, run it, and now they get the dreaded C:\Windows is not accessible error.
Anyway. Yes. Releases.
If we as a project are committed to doing 0.9, 1.0+ releases it means we can't simply break code people are using to play their games for months at a time and shrug it off. What other projects do this? I can't think of any.
For most projects CVS is CVS and is where stuff is broken then fixed, and releases are what users install. They are expected to not ship with important features missing.
Other projects typically use branches to deal with this, or in the case of the kernel fork off into separate projects that just maintain huge differentials which are folded back in when complete. So what do we do?
thanks -mike