[scribus-dev] New Dev Version Splash Screen?

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/12/2014 07:07 PM, Kunda Loves Scribus wrote:
> Greets y'all,
> So just recently a fresh feature popped up in the Scribus issue 
> tracker: http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12382
>
> Masterminded by the one and only a-l-e. After a great hardy chuckle, I 
> really settled in to appreciating the intelligence of this issue. As 
> we make the dev versions of Scribus more available and easily 
> attainable for the everyday unsophisticated user we also raise the 
> possibility that people will start to use these experimental builds in 
> production environments. In general this is a big, as Sasha Baron 
> Cohen AKA 'Bruno' would say: "Niche Niche."
>
> Emerging examples of Bleeding Edge build availability: Scribus and 
> Homebrew for OSX formula, MrB very close to uploading bleeding edge 
> OSX nightlies to Sourceforge, JLuc releasing an Ubuntu friendly script 
> on github that builds trunk..etc...
>
> But as FirasH pointed out that on machines that use SSD the splash 
> screen is almost invisible (because loading speed is so fast). So I 
> think we may need to go a little extra than just altering the Splash 
> screen.
>
> Ideas:
> 1. Append to the title of the Scribus window "Experimental Build not 
> to be used in Production Environment" (or some variant)
> 2. Embed in the grey background behind the canvas (perhaps diagonally 
> repeating) a watermark that says something like 'Experimental Build'. 
> This would be repeated redundantly.
>
>
The practical history of Scribus development goes something like this:

At any moment in time we have a version branded "stable" (or official) 
and another "unstable" (or development).
Typically the most striking difference between the two is when the 
former unstable becomes the new official stable, and former stable 
becomes deprecated, and a new unstable is born. Something like the 
birth, life, and death of stars in (very) fast forward, except that we 
don't have black holes (careful with the commentary) or supernovae.

Even though the party line is to use stable, don't use unstable in 
production environments, there typically comes a time in the process 
that the unstable is nearly stable, and has some features that people 
really want/need. We're getting near that point with the 1.5.0 series now.

So I think it's Ok to have some sorts of cautions somewhere, but to 
carve this into the splashscreen is too rigid and at some point just 
incorrect.

Greg