The pains of integration

The price of a ready made curry at the local supermarket has gone down. This is a good thing. The portion size of a ready made curry at the local supermarket has also gone down. Out of proportion to the price drop. This is a bad thing. And it’s what I’m attributing the yelps of anguish to that can be regularly heard around the RunRev office at the moment.

Or it could be the pains of integration. You see, several long running projects are now coming together. And this means integrating several months of hard work into a single LiveCode installer. Which is far, far harder than you can ever imagine. The build process is almost entirely automated. But due to the complexity of the process and the number of platforms to support, there are so many points at which it can fail. And as soon as you solve one problem, several others appear to take its place.

It’s these final steps that developers find so frustrating. After months of implementing new features, you think the all the hard work is done. But in reality, it’s only just begun. It’s almost enough to force developers to get up and microwave their own curries.

The dreaded rebuild

We have an automated test system that we run on all new builds. This ensures that all releases we put out are of the highest quality. This is a good thing. The test system has a habit of spotting critical bugs moments before we’re about to push the release button. This is a bad thing. Especially if it’s last thing on a Friday. Often, the fix itself is trivial. But the dreaded rebuild that follows is usually not.

Dependencies are supposed to make the build process smoother. But it seems they fail when you most need them: Fraser once told me that if you so much as look at libSkia funny, it will decide a full rebuild is needed. I believe him. We have a dog in the office named Pancake and she’s always looking at me funny. I can only assume she gives the same treatment to libSkia. I’m not laying blame though. I think that’s just what her face looks like.

The future

Within the next few months several new and exciting versions of LiveCode will be released. This is a good thing. For the next few months, us LiveCode developers will be spending all our time fixing bugs and refining features. Well, this is a good thing, for you at least…