[Rails-devel] Versioning

[Jim B. <ji...@ko...>]

Under  "Implementation levels", earlier, there were some comments I found profoundly discouraging:

> I think the assumption should just be to finish a
> game with the same version of Rails that started the game.

This, quite simply- has never happened in any pbem game I've played with rails.

If you really believe this is the current state of affairs, you should version-lock Rails to the save-files.  

But- we all know this would be completely unacceptable!

Why?  Because /everyone/ is upgrading their games, in progress.

Indeed, thankfully- the developers are at great pains to keep this working.  It's fundamental- we upgrade when possible, somewhere along the way.

Many of these games take /months/ pbem- that's a lifetime worth of Rails releases and critical bug fixes.


> The one concern I have with this is showstopper bugs.  If a group is playing
> a game, gets halfway through, and can't continue because of a bug, there
> should be some support for converting their game to the new version with the
> bugfix.

With every pbem game I've played with rails, either (a) bugs happened and forced an upgrade, or (b) users saved with a more recent version, and forced an upgrade.
  
> I'm not saying that we won't support users when they have
> problems.  We absolutely should and will. 
>
>  as developers, we shouldn't spend a lot of time
> trying to preserve backwards compatibility with old save formats. It's
> extra work that just doesn't buy us anything at this stage in rails'
> maturity.

In my opinion- as a 'user'- these two statements simply couldn't be more in opposition.

> If the number of safe files that we need to migrate forward to the new
> format grows substantially, obviously we'll need to change this
> strategy or develop tools to allow users to migrate save files. For
> now, I'd just like to see bug fixes and new games/features take a
> higher priority than save file compatibility.

As a rails/pbem user, host, n00b trainer, and dedicated evangelist- most all outstanding Rails issues don't even /rank/, by comparison, with versioning, and ease-of install/configuration/upgrade/launch.

I can understand that this is hard from the development side of the fence, really.

Nonetheless- I strongly suspect that almost the /only/ users able to keep to one version for a whole game, successfully, are the ones on this list, that are running Rails directly from their shared dropbox folder, and then- only playing a title that was stabilized many months ago.  (eg 1830 18al 18eu).  We've all agreed this is an insecure approach- it's an expert/developer/insider solution, not a community solution.

So, if you think most of your users /are/- or even, /can/- use the same rails version to complete a rails game, as they started with- it's simply not remotely close to the actual reality, in my experience.  It would really help the discussion- and rails' evolution- if you took this into honest account.

 - jim