Quote:
Originally Posted by ondoho
rbtylee, thanks again for the details, my question has been fully answered.
this has really made me curious to try out bodhi (in a vm, right now).
i think i remember that e always had one stable release, and one development version?
like, e17 was stable, e18 was dev?
are you saying those stable releases are buggy?
and bodhi originally started off with the development version, which then became the stable release, and they decided to stick to that?
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Truthfully all e releases are development releases. They decide they want to release pick a list of bugs on
phab they want fixed for the release try to get those bugs fixed and do an alpha release. If anything important to them is discovered in the alpha release that gets gets fix, several iterations of that and when mostly satisfied they call it a release and put on their download site. Is it buggy, well yes it is. There will be known bugs, phab tickets, that went unfixed. They were deemed either not important enough or a wasted effort because changes they know are coming in EFL would break the fix or in some way perhaps address the issue or perhaps even to fix the phap issue is too difficult or hasn't even been properly looked at it yet.
So is the release buggy, well yes it is. It will have known reported bugs as well as unknown and not reported bugs. It's stability will also rely upon EFL and EFl has its own list of issues.
Is this bad, well maybe depends on your point of view. But honestly almost all software has bugs and about any open source project I have looked at will have a long list of reported known bugs. Often hundreds if not thousands. Some web sites such as Launchpad (Ubuntu mainly) close these bug reports if there is not any activity on them, if it can't be duplicated or when a new release comes out. This in effect hides the bug report but by no means means the bug was fixed. I hate that, have an issue google around and find a launchpad report on the very same issue and it is closed but unfixed. Sometimes even a comment by some dev saying it is not an issue and doesn't happen and here it is happening on my machine
<Off topic but relevant>
A friend of mine, a professional programmer/mathematician, used to have great faith in mathematical verification of computer code. A mathematical proof that the code actually works and is bug free. It all sounds great in theory, but decades of research into it have yielded little practical use of it. It is incredibly hard to do in the real world with anything other than trivial code, and honestly is almost impossible to do with computer languages other than certain functional ones like haskell or Lisp. And then to further complicate things mathematical program verification has two hidden assumptions one is that the compiler or interpreter of the language functions error free and two that the computer hardware also functions as specified. Well the first assumption that the compiler works error free is clearly false, gcc for example has a list of known bugs. And on the second that the hardware works as expected, it should be noted that a real world computer is not the same thing as an idealized Abstract Turing machine. It is a very complex electrical device, amounting to millions of transistors wired up into some complex circuit. All created by humans perhaps with the usage of software also created by humans build by machines and people and in honesty it blows my mind they work as well as they do. Are they error free almost certainly not.
</Off topic but relevant>
So yes I am saying all releases of e are buggy as are all releases of every other window manager or DE out there. Asking if it is buggy is not the proper question, the proper question is does it work well enough for the average user to use daily without the thing segfaulting, freezing up, restarting, trashing your data, or otherwise F****** up on a regular basises. This is a bit subjective.
Can I cause e22 to crash well yes i can it crashed on me twice the other day while I was playing with a new e22 module. Can I cause moksha to crash, well again yes I can. I know moksha flaws prop better than anyone other than perhaps some of the e-devs who were at one time very familiar with e17 code (I am thinking of
raster here). Moksha and many other window managers will crash and try to hide that from the user, moksha simply restarts as does my
roku. It should be noted I added back the code to get t
he old enlightenment error msg when this happens for debugging purposes, Jeff had completely removed it, but it now depends on an environmental variable being set. I needed it to halt then instead of restart so I could
debug it. This is currently undocumented and probably I am the only one that even uses it.
Is e17 less buggy than e22, well no. e17 won't even compile right now (with current versions of efl). But if fixed to compile it still has numerous issues fixed in later versions of enlightenment. Is Moksha less buggy than e22? Honestly that is subjective. The e developers have put more effort into fixing memory leaks than I have and they have been using static code analysis tools to find errors and fix them that I have not been using. Maybe one day ...
And so on. Some enlightenment changes I backport. But they commit alot and I don't follow it all. And moreover as the enlightenment code base diverges from our e17 base some of the commits are difficult to implement or address errors moksha does not have.
But for daily usage, what the users sees and experiences Jeff thinks Moksha is more 'stable' than e22. Both Jeff and I keep an eye on the newer enlightenment versions. I have multiple VMs with multiple snapshots running different distros and different Window managers. And of course Moksha, e17 and various versions of e and efl installed. I use them daily for various reasons, so I kind of have an idea of how often various versions of enlightenment or Moksha crashes. I have saw weird issues on both moksha and e22, crashes freezes and whatnot. Could I use e22 for daily usage well actually I could. I am less bothered by things like that than the average person.
Do I think Moksha is more 'stable'? Well yes for what I do it is,
mostly. Your experience may vary. A Lot of factors at play here, your hardware the software you use and so on. e22 is much better than e19 so enlightenment is getting better all the time. Much more people work on enlightenment than Moksha. Moksha is mostly me with Štefan (the_waiter) making minor changes now and then. And for full disclosure I am in a bit over my head in some of it. Learning as I go.
Jeff decided to fork e17 and we are sticking with that for now. As Štefan notes at the time "
when Bodhi switched to release 3 with e19. Very unstable, slow and buggy.". We sort of had no choice: stick with e17 and an old version of efl or make e17 work with the new versions of efl. Using e19 wasn't reasonable for what our users wanted. Now when i focus on Moksha I am concerned mostly with making it work with newer versions of efl and fixing known issues and trying not to break anything in the process. And occasionally Stefan or I add some minor new feature or I make some code changes transparent to the end user for whatever reason I had at the time.
I am uncertain if any of this answered your question but perhaps it clarified it some.
