Survex 1.2.33 released

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 11:47:19PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> Survex is cross-built for Windows, and has been for about 20 years
> now. Nothing has changed here. No-one is 'retreating' anywhere, you
> silly man. Survex usage appears to have survived this state of afairs
> for some time, and I don't see that that's likely to change.

I don't think I've ever built it natively.  And I'd argue that's
actually a good thing as it makes it really unlikely that you'll get a
virus infected download.

> Ol presumably does have access to a Windows box at least sometimes,
> because he manages to fix bugs there. But I really don't see anything
> wrong with a process where the package is built and you lot test it
> (on a range of versions which no one person is ever going to
> own). When you start paying for a fancier service you can demand more
> complete testing procedures. In the meantime this crowd-sourced test
> procedure seems to be working quite well, with this particular bug
> found almost immediately, and no doubt fixed quite quickly too.

Indeed - we're really working together as a community to make this
happen.  It's just not realistic for me to have a copy of every version
of every operating system people want to use Survex on and to run a
thorough test of every single feature on all of them before each
release.

We have a fairly comprehensive set of tests for cavern, but it's much
harder to automate tests of a GUI application like aven.

I can test under Wine (https://www.winehq.org/) but I don't do that
for every single release I make, only when there's something that seems
worth checking.  Also Jenny has access to machines running Windows at
work so she can sometimes test with a particular version.

If you run Linux but a different distro to me you're in a similar
situation really.  James Begley quite often sends over tweaks needed for
Fedora for example.

In this case, the issue is that wxWidgets (the library we use to allow
aven to work on all these different platforms) has a stupid check which
means you have to build wxWidgets and Survex with not-to-different
versions of the compiler or else it fails on startup with that message.
(The check is stupid because actually it would work fine if it just
continued.)

The reason it fails isn't due to any change in the Survex code so I
didn't have a reason to test it.  Unfortunately that meant a bad release
got shipped, but I doubt very many people died as a result and I'm
working on a new build already.

I'm also going to come up with a plan to avoid repeating this same
problem in the future.

Cheers,
    Olly