Beta Testing FAQ
This page contains FAQ from beta testers of Valentina products
General
Q: I am current user of a Valentina product. Why I should prefer to participate in the beta testing?
Let us continue above question: “May be better to be lazy or “very busy right today” and wait while other people do this dirty job?”
Few reasons can be listed:
If everybody will be lazy or “very busy” then nobody to test.
If you participate then you can check early that your product works with newer build.
You can push Valentina development in the direction you need. Yes we listen and try implement features.
Yes we perfectly understand, that must be very easy way switch between RELEASE (x) and BETA (x+1). In the section below we give tips how you can use beta builds easy.
Installation & Start
Q: Where to download latest beta build?
Q: Where to discuss beta builds?
Q: How to report bugs and/or feature requests?
Q: How to uninstall beta?
In this Valentina WIKI exists section Products. For each product you can find section Manual/Installation where should be described how to install and uninstall a product.
In short:
-
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.
Q: What is a 'night build' and how it differs from beta build?
Valentina team uses Continuous Integration to organize delivery of high quality product.
One part of this 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:
Previous night builds are removed each time. Beta builds, on the other hand, live on FTP as long, as some version is in the beta state.
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 unsure that all Valentina products can be built at the current state of GIT, and nothing was broken. Valentina Team consider this as proof of this fact.
You may want to use night_build, if you very need some fix, which you know is resolved. If you are not in rush, then you should prefer to use beta builds.
Mix of Release with Beta
Yes we perfectly understand, that should be easy way to switch between RELEASE(x) and BETA(x+1). In this section we give some tips how you can use beta builds easy.
Absolutely the best way is to use some Virtual Machine (Virtual Box, Parallels, …) to install one more
OS + your development tools and use this as branch of your development process for any purpose including beta testing of third party products, which you use, including Valentina products. Also it is good save copy of such virtual machine in the good state, so if something go wrong, you can recover everything in just 1-2 minutes. Try this. You will love this way.
If you do not want to play with virtual machines, below you can find more tips how to resolve the task on the same computer.
Q: I am using latest RELEASE in active development. How I can use BETA build and do easy switch ?
Different issues exists for different OS and different products.
MAC VStudio.app – very easy 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 can have several Valentina Servers installed with different names, and they can work in the same time, yet you must specify different ports for each.
Q: How I can easy switch between vcomponents of different versions?
So our task is to have on the same computer TWO folders e.g. vcomponents_v4 and vcomponents_v5 and switch between them as easy as 1-2 mouse clicks. Lets think how this can be resolved on MAC and Linux at first. We need 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. Below we give example how this script can looks. You need make 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 do all the same logical steps, just you will create not .sh scripts but .bat files.