Been silent for too long. There are many things I’d like to write, but time is limited. And there’s been a lot happening lately. There are some interesting news in WinMerge, but I’ll write about them later (I promise!). This post is about coming WinMerge 2.10 release.
Yes, it is only about four months from 2.8 release. And yet the 2.10 release is almost there. One things I haven’t been writing about is our new development model. I’ll write about it later but in short we are now trying to make 2-3 stable release during a year. This hopefully solves some problems we’ve had with development and it also delivers new features and fixes faster to users. 2.10 will be first release with this new model and so far its been working well.
So what exciting new features there are for 2.10 release? Well… There is almost nothing new in 2.10. Release notes is pretty short in listing new things.
Why bother with new stable release without new exciting features? Bug fixes. Lots of them. Smaller improvements all over the place. 2.8.x was a good release. But there is always a lot to improve. In general I’m pretty happy with WinMerge stability. We have no obvious “data loss” bugs or obvious crash bugs open. But then there are too many annoying bugs.
These annoying bugs are the hardest bugs. If the bug causes a crash or data loss, it for sure gets investigated. Sometimes we don’t get enough information or for some other reasons can’t fix them, but usually crashes and data loss bugs get fixed pretty fast. But if the bug is just annoying, it is easy to just ignore it. It is easy to get used to these small annoyances. So why bother wasting time to fix them… There are more important things to do.
Lets look at couple of examples of fixed annoying bugs in 2.10 release:
- bug #787588 Changing regular expression filter does not refresh display was submitted five years ago. It didn’t cause any data lost. But some confusion when results weren’t automatically updated as user rightfully expected. So user had to do rescan manually. Not a big deal. I personally tried to fix this bug several times, but every attempt failed as the result was worse than current situation. Finally couple of months ago I rethought the whole thing – what user expected and what WinMerge could do. Users don’t expect magic, just logical behavior. That WinMerge can do. It took me couple of hours to fix this years old problem. Now I’m so used to new fixed behavior I really don’t want to use versions without this fix if I need line filters. It feels so dump to do a manual rescan.
- todo #1460517 Use default settings from HKLM in registry is related to many bug items about installer. Basically the problem was WinMerge installed itself only for currently logged in user. So e.g. in cases administrator installed WinMerge to computer it didn’t get properly installed to user. I’ve personally several times (in several bug items) claimed this was hard to fix. And that we needed to big improvements to options system and whatever. Until I really started looking into it. It turned to be changing few (mis-)coded registry value settings in the installer script. This I learned from reading installer software manual for few minutes. Biggest thing was to write short code to copy some values from general settings to current user. But these couple of hours I used means WinMerge 2.10 is finally possible to be properly installed in many environments it wasn’t possible earlier.
- bug #1740106 Flicker when resizing location pane didn’t look important bug for me. So it flickers, big deal. But this is really annoying bug after all. You don’t want screen flickering in modern computer. Fixing this took quite a lot of time. I actually had to redesign and rewrite lots of location pane code. But while doing it it also become faster and lot better structured. Also making room for future improvements. And once again after using version which doesn’t flicker, old versions feel bad to use.
There are many other such annoying things fixed in WinMerge 2.10. So I could say WinMerge 2.10 is less annoying to use than earlier versions! Though lots of people say they like to use WinMerge.
One very important improvement in WinMerge 2.10 is the rewritten user manual. I’ve read many people thanking us about good manual. I was proud of that since I’ve been writing most of the 2.8.x version manual. It’s been lot of work. But when Dennis contacted us and told he wants to help, I was even happier. Rare Open Source projects have luxury of professional writer writing manual!
I really like the work Denis has been doing. Well, it also makes my old work look not so great in comparison… But I’ve already learned a lot from Denis and its been a pleasure to work with him. While WinMerge is not hard to use (at least we try to make it easy to use) it still has learning curve. If one wants to use WinMerge efficiently one needs to know basics about file comparing and how it works. There are things like regular expressions, diffs and patches.
Oh, but aren’t those obvious things to all experienced computer users/developers/administrators?
WRONG. One thing that keeps surprising me with WinMerge is how different user groups use it. It really is not just developers and administrators. I’ve heard people using WinMerge to manage their digital photo collection. I’d never have guessed you can use WinMerge for that. And that is just one example. So WinMerge needs a manual that normal computer users understand. Now we have it.
I’ve told about many important improvements. I wish I had time to write about them all. But you have to look at changelog and release notes for more information.
I’m sure 2.10 release is once again a release all we developers (and other people contributing) can be very proud of.
