Beta Testing FAQ

Let us continue with a question: “Maybe it`s better to be lazy or “extremely busy right today” and wait while other people are just doing this dirty job?”

Actually, few reasons can be listed:

• If everybody is lazy or “very busy” nobody will test new features.
• If you participate then you can check early that your product works with a newer build.
• You can push Valentina development in the direction _you_ need. Yes, we are listening and always try to implement asked features.

Yes, we perfectly understand, that it must be very easy way to switch between RELEASE (x) and BETA (x+1). In the section below we give tips about how you can use beta builds easily.

http://www.valentina-db.com/download/beta/

Please subscribe to Valentina-beta list.

• Please use our Mantis bug tracker. You should register your own account. http://www.valentina-db.com/bt/

• Check also Feature Requests and Bug Reporting FAQ

In this Valentina WIKI the section Products exists. For each product you can find section Manual/Installation where it should be described how to install and uninstall a product.

In short:

• On Windows use control panel to run uninstaller

• On MAC OS X:
  • VStudio.app – just trash it
  • VServer.app – stop VServer then trash folder /Library/VServer
  • Valentina ADK – you need trash two folders: “My Docukements/Paradigma Software/ADK” and “/usr/local/lib/vcomponents”. Also trash corresponded plugin from your IDE/Language.

• On Linux ??? using package uninstaller ???

Valentina team uses Continuous Integration to organize delivery of high quality product.

One part of this methodology is a night build. It is produced automatically from the current state of HotFix or NextRelase branch(es). It is uploaded into '/download/beta/night_buld' folder with name 'ver.ver.ver_(yy_mm_dd)'. So can be one or even two builds here. For example:

• night_build/5.5.3_(2014_01_10)
• night_build/6.0_(2014_01_10)

Previous night builds are being removed each time. Beta builds, on the other hand, live on FTP up to release.

A beta build is produced by Valentina Team when we see that some logical task is finished and is ready for testing by beta testers.

Purpose of a night_build is to ensure that all Valentina products can be built at the current state of GIT and nothing is broken. You may want to use a night_build, if you urgently need some fix, which you know is resolved. If you are not in rush, then you should prefer to use beta builds.

Different issues exist for different OS and different products.

• MAC VStudio.app – easily install and remove because it is self-contained package.
• WIN VStudio – installer installs into separate folder “Paradigma Software/Valentina Studio 5”. This folder also contains everything. Registry is not touched.

• VServer installers tend to install into the same folder, so this works as upgrade and existed databases are used. VServer also contains everything in the own folder. You may have several Valentina Servers installed with different names, and they can work in the same time, yet you must specify different ports for each one of them.

• Valentina ADK – usually installs two folder:
  • “My Documents/ADK_4” where 4 is version number. So a new beta will install e.g. ADK_5 folder. There is no conflict here. Everything is ok.
  • “VCOMPONENTS” - folder of shared dlls on MAC and Linux: /usr/local/lib/vcomponents, on WIN: “Program Files/Paradigma Software/vcomponents”. Probably in future we will start to use version number here vcomponents_5. Currently you should switch vcomponents between different versions. See below how to.

Our task is to have on the same computer TWO folders e.g. vcomponents_v4 and vcomponents_v5 and switch between them as easily as 1-2 mouse clicks. Lets think how this can be resolved on MAC and Linux at first. We should keep copies of both db in the place where OS do not search dlls. Lets choose HOME to be a such place.

1-0) Let you have version 4.x installed. So you have '/usr/local/lib/vcomponents' folder.
1-1) Create folder “HOME/v4”.
1-2) COPY '/usr/local/lib/vcomponents' to '~/v4/vcomponents.
1-3) COPY your plugin of v4 build to '~/v4'.

Now lets care about v5 build.

2-0) Install V5 build. Now you get again folder '/usr/local/lib/vcomponents'.
2-1) Create folder “HOME/v5”.
2-2) COPY '/usr/local/lib/vcomponents' to '~/v5/vcomponents.
1-3) COPY your plugin of v5 build to '~/v5'.

Now we have two folders side by side in the HOME folder of TWO different versions. It is simple enough to write two small scripts that copy corresponded version into the right place. We give an example below on how this script can look. You should make your own scripts corrected path to plugins folder and name of plugin you use.

switch_to_v4.sh

rm -R /usr/local/lib/vcomponents
cp ~/v4/vcomponents /usr/local/lib/vcomponents 

cp ~/v4/v4rb.rbx /Applications/REALbasic/plugins

switch_to_v5.sh

rm -R /usr/local/lib/vcomponents
cp ~/v5/vcomponents /usr/local/lib/vcomponents 

cp ~/v5/v4rb.rbx /Applications/REALbasic/plugins

On MAC OS X, you can also create two small AppleScripts using the same above SHELL commands, just called with help of do shell command “text of command” and drop that scripts “HOME/Library/Scripts” folder to be able call them from MAC OS menu.''
On Windows you need to do all the same logical steps, you will just create not .sh scripts but .bat files.