FreeGuide - putting recording on hold

FreeGuide has been stalled for about a year because the basic code for recording programmes has been sitting in SVN, but it contained far too many bugs to be useable, even by the developers. This kind of situation completely takes the wind out of development, since any little bug fixes or features people want to send it are either against very old code, or never get written because when they download the latest code it doesn't work.

I am more and more of the opinion that the code in your trunk (or HEAD, in CVS terminology) should ALWAYS by _better_ than the latest release. I.e. it should only contain bug fixes and properly tested new features. Anything else (i.e. code that is still being knocked into shape) should live in a branch. Branches are pain, but not as much pain as your project dying because new developers who try and do the right thing (download the latest code) are confronted by non-working code and move on to something more fun.

So, I've reverted the recording code. If we want to resurrect it, we can branch from just before where I reverted, and then merge from the trunk into that branch any other fixes that apply.

The next release of FreeGuide will be from the trunk, and will contain bug fixes and small new features submitted by a couple of people who have stepped up to do the work. I hope, when my life settles slightly, that I might even be one of them.

New baby resolution: never allow non-completely-working code in trunk. Without new developers, your project will die.

Small hypocritical extra note: I completely broke the code in trunk by reverting the recording code, so now it loses all your settings when you exit. Use with extreme caution. This, of course, completely breaks the above resolution. I will fix it when I can, and in the meantime, Rick is looking into it, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.