I want to describe how we are going to go about releasing RoasTime in the future. There will be 3 stages of release.
Alpha
Alpha releases are meant for internal testing. These are built and released every few days. Features in here are considered “bleeding edge” and bugs are expected.
Beta
Beta releases are meant for public testing. These are released a few weeks. This is at a stage where things should be relatively stable, but we expect some bugs in these versions that we were unable to find internally and rely on you guys to help us refine and define the product. You do not need to opt in to upgrade to beta releases (you will still receive a notification in application).
Stable
Stable releases are official releases. They are released every couple/few months. Bugs should be minimal, but we will not say non existent. Most users should wait until this release to upgrade their software.
We appreciate everyone and their feedback. We are coming into 2019 with big ideas for RoasTime and stability improvements, but it can’t be done without the community.
It would be a cool to have a preferences option in the Update menu so we could self select to be on either the stable (default) or beta channel for our automatic updating prompts. I’d assume you would only want people to manually download the alpha releases.
Also, can different versions be installed concurrently? Say I wanted to test the newest alpha but wanted to be able to easily swap back to the stable version if there were problems?
I would love to hear all your thoughts, but my idea is to have an “opt in” type of checkbox within the preferences where you will only receive update notifications for opted in channels.
I will look into being able to have multiple versions concurrently, but might take some thought on my end.
I was bit yesterday by the lack of release channels. I have been reading the problems with RT2 and was going to let you figure them out before upgrading, but apparently firmware 475 doesn’t work with the old drivers any more, and the new drivers are only distributed with RT2. So I go onto Github, and am choosing from 3 day old alpha releases, which requires reverse engineering your intent from the version numbers and digging through the releases to find the most stable-looking build. From the reports here, unfinished software has been released as prod, so I was hoping to avoid that. I picked … win32-x64-prod-v2.2.0-beta ¯_(ツ)_/¯
There is no way to know if that is the most stable release since all the releases are commingled in one channel. It doesn’t need to be a fancy in-software button or nothing, a separate section on a static gh-pages that says “windows stable: ” would be a great help.
In case anyone else doesn’t know the web-address of where Aillio keeps all these various releases (such as the 2.2.0 version that Jacob mentions above). I had to back-into the address below by capturing an older version’s download link. RoasTime Releases
That link is (at least) in the latest version of the manual. But between this and the other thread we were talking in, I wonder if it would be worth finding a way to put up some sort of community wiki, where we could try to better organize and highlight all the stuff we seem to be stumbling across and that isn’t easy to find in official channels while the crew at Aillio seems all-hands on pushing through feature development (which is fine by me…)
That’s why I’d opt to give them latitude as well. They are obviously busy developing and adjusting the product design which sometimes doesn’t allow for all the tech-writing that needs to be done.
Absolutely. The more I think about it, the more I think a community wiki makes a lot of sense. The information is all around somewhere between the official documentation, forum posts and the collective experience of the users. If there’s a way to harness that to build some easy-to-follow supplementary information, even if not “official,” that could save a lot of user trouble and maybe buy the folks working on the product more time to build features. As things stand today, I’d bet that the next time a batch of new units lands in a short time period (like the one from SM earlier this month) or the next release of some software comes out, all these things are going to come up again and maybe someone will luck into one of these discussions–or maybe they won’t and they’ll just be repeated.
A new Production release of RoasTime is available on GitHub: v/2.2.0
I’ve been using the alpha version 2.2.1 alpha since it was released about 24 Mar 2019. I had no negative issues on my Win 10 laptop (Bullet f/w v/500) using the alpha release.
The code download in GitHub has the ability to easily house a wiki. I’ve used this at work a little and it is easy to update. I think if they started the pages it could be opened up for others to contribute with the developers having final say on committing the changes.
My RoasTime preferences are set as “Release Channel Opt In” “stable” yet for some reason my current SW is 2.3.2-alpha (Mac). I just installed the IBTS; did that trigger an “upgrade” to the alpha? Do I have to use the alpha with the IBTS? I prefer to use stable releases, but I have given up trying to find them. It is wearying to try to sift through many sources of information and software: Facebook, the Aillio website, roast.world, the manual, GitHub.
To follow on my to my previous post, reading some other threads discussing the difficulties in searching for current information led me to more information than I’ve been able to find in the past, and has also reassured me that the folks at Aillio are taking pains to make it easier to find that information. Also, I just did my first roast after installing the IBTS and it went pretty well. No software glitches, and everything went smoothly start to finish!