Hell yeah
We need more
Veracity Rocks threads, maybe it would help to put in perspective some negative feedback.
On a more serious note, I think the "caterToWhiners" preference could be addressed somehow.
In the current state of things, changes are committed by developers, new revisions appear on
http://builds.kolmafia.us/, and a new "version" of Mafia is spinned from time to time.
- Devs commit changes because of bug reports, feature requests, technical discussions between scripters, or because they have their own projects. This generally involves the kolmafia.us community via discussions prior to a change and feedback (even criticism!) after the change is committed.
- Regular mafia users will use a recent build, either because they use an auto-updater, because the read the commit logs and see a change they would like to benefit from, or because they simply got into the habit of updating every few days/weeks.
- Then there are users who only update when they see a pop-up from Mafia saying that a new version is available. I think these are mostly people that are new to Mafia, or use it very rarely.
I guess the regular users are more or less up to date with what is being changed in Mafia because they use it to play KoL, but only post here to ask for specific advice or to report an unexpected behavior. Those users discover changes when they launch mafia and do not take part in the development process. Maybe this is part of the problem.
In the case of a commit that breaks a part of Mafia, the devs are expected to pay attention to the feedback and issues are always fixed quickly. Regular users, even if they have lost a few adventures or a bit of meat, generally understand that using a recent revision implicitly means that they are running this kind of risk. In a sense, they are beta-testing, since they are using the latest revision.
Maybe using a recent revision should also mean that you want to be part of the development process, and not simply that you are running the latest Mafia. I don't know anything about software engineering, but it feels like Mafia is lacking something between the moment a change is committed to the code and the moment this change is propagated to regular users: the beta-testing is implicit and not always acknowledged.
I try to test my changes as much as possible, but I mostly tweak little bits of code that are simple to check. Some things, like wandering monsters overriding Ultrahydrated, are more complicated to test. Since I want to try a couple of changes before making sure I will commit something that will work, it would be great to have a group of kolmafia.us regulars who run a Mafia branch with my change and report what happens.
Of course, it wouldn't remove entirely the need for a "caterToWhiners" preference, but if a smaller, more involved group of users give feedback before regular users, it would surely be more constructive than some GD posts. The current workaround is to post patches, but not enough people download, build and report on changes that are not committed to the source.
I would like to have a way to commit to an experimental branch of Mafia, and wait until I am satisfied with the feedback to commit to the main source. Maybe others could chime in here - I know those who had the patience to read this all of this long and poorly written post are probably the ones I am turning to for ideas.