6 ms·

Instead of taking 2 years to close 600 issues, why not ship a release each month with just a handful addressed? I think plugin developers are more likely to kee

Instead of taking 2 years to close 600 issues, why not ship a release each month with just a handful addressed? I think plugin developers are more likely to keep their plugins maintained if it looks like Sublime Text is alive. I'd much rather pay $50 a year for ~monthly releases than $70 every 2-3 years for one release and a few bug fixes.

wbond 6y ago
Part of our development pace is that we are a small team (six engineers), bootstrapped, maintaining multiple products, and looking to do things in a way that fits with our vision for the products. We want to build products that are around for the long haul – Sublime Text has been around for 15 years. We'd rather focus on quality and performance than adding lots of features. We are doing a big release because our current licensing scheme requires a "major version" release for paid updates. If we did a release once a month, they would all be trivial features, and wouldn't justify a major version bump. For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. However, since this is a major release, it has some very significant changes that need testing, refining and polishing. I don't think anyone in their right mind would ship a half-finished product and call it a major release, so we've been doing the work that shows it is a major release. The downside of bigger releases is that sometimes they end up dragging on a little longer than you want, and we'd rather uphold our vision for the product than have a release done a few months earlier. As I mentioned in my post above, we've got some changes coming that will help address the "major version" issue and allow us to take on a faster release cycle. That said, I'm not sure I agree that new releases once a month are a good fit for the majority of users. We do, however, provide dev builds for users who do like seeing changes quickly. We've got a super active group of some of the more prolific plugin developers that we interact with on a daily basis on our public Discord server. They definitely provide a lot of feedback and we make a point of listening to what the have to say. The reality of it is that most open source developers wax and wane in their development work. The ones who stick with projects for years and years tend to either do open source work related to their day job, or are at least partially employed to work on the open source work. Others will get an itch, scratch it, share it, improve it and then be satisfied.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  > For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. I'm a licence holder and I haven't seen an update since October 2019. Despite reading most of this thread I haven't managed to figure out where any more recent releases are. Can you point me towards them?
  - kemayo 6y ago
    You need to join their Discord to find the Sublime Text 4 dev channel. It's not marketed anywhere, you just have to have searched their forum for it. https://discord.gg/D43Pecu https://discord.gg/D43Pecu Sublime Text 3, as you say, has gone without dev updates since 2019 with no announcements about why or pointers to the new version. Yes, they're very bad at some of these communications issues. :D
    - wbond 6y ago
      We intentionally decided to have the dev builds for ST4 go to a smaller group of people, paired with a low-friction communication medium. Clearly you disagree with that decision, but we do communicate with our users pretty much every day. We simply decided trying to communicate and gather feedback from tens of thousands of users was less productive for a team of six than hundreds of engaged power users.
      - kemayo 6y ago
        My only disagreement with your chosen course was the lack of update on the ST3 dev builds page. As-is, it gives the impression to users like the ones I replied to that there's no progress being made. Sticking a note at the top of the ST3 dev build page akin to the one on the ST2 dev builds page, even without a link to the discord or new builds, would have changed their perception of things. Or even just a post on your news blog that you're moving active development to an upcoming version? A pinned post on your forum? There really was no communication to users who're not actively involved in the community, that I could find.
NDizzle 6y ago
Am I in the minority that I don't want to see updates monthly for a desktop application? It seems like every time I launch paint.net, for example, it wants to update. I don't want to update! I want to edit an image.
- wedowhatwedo 6y ago
  I completely agree.
- ggregoire 6y ago
  If I used paint.net 8 hours a day on daily basis as I do with VSCode, yeah I'd would probably want to keep it updated as much as possible. Also I rarely "launch" VSCode, it's always open. Which means the updates are downloaded in background and it just shows a small icon at the bottom right when it's ready to be restarted. It's almost invisible and doesn't bother me at all, and I can wait as much as I want before restarting it.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Discord, an application used by ST community, suffers from exactly that as well. "Release early, release often" -- but not too often. I'm not a beta tester, I want stable software.
- fomine3 6y ago
  BTW paint.net has the best integrated auto updater I've ever used. It notifies at startup but has "Install When I Exit" button on update notification dialog. Of course auto update by package manager is still better. (paint.net also available on Windows Store)

wbond 6y ago

Part of our development pace is that we are a small team (six engineers), bootstrapped, maintaining multiple products, and looking to do things in a way that fits with our vision for the products. We want to build products that are around for the long haul – Sublime Text has been around for 15 years. We'd rather focus on quality and performance than adding lots of features. We are doing a big release because our current licensing scheme requires a "major version" release for paid updates. If we did a release once a month, they would all be trivial features, and wouldn't justify a major version bump. For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. However, since this is a major release, it has some very significant changes that need testing, refining and polishing. I don't think anyone in their right mind would ship a half-finished product and call it a major release, so we've been doing the work that shows it is a major release. The downside of bigger releases is that sometimes they end up dragging on a little longer than you want, and we'd rather uphold our vision for the product than have a release done a few months earlier. As I mentioned in my post above, we've got some changes coming that will help address the "major version" issue and allow us to take on a faster release cycle. That said, I'm not sure I agree that new releases once a month are a good fit for the majority of users. We do, however, provide dev builds for users who do like seeing changes quickly. We've got a super active group of some of the more prolific plugin developers that we interact with on a daily basis on our public Discord server. They definitely provide a lot of feedback and we make a point of listening to what the have to say. The reality of it is that most open source developers wax and wane in their development work. The ones who stick with projects for years and years tend to either do open source work related to their day job, or are at least partially employed to work on the open source work. Others will get an itch, scratch it, share it, improve it and then be satisfied.

danpalmer 6y ago
> For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. I'm a licence holder and I haven't seen an update since October 2019. Despite reading most of this thread I haven't managed to figure out where any more recent releases are. Can you point me towards them?
- kemayo 6y ago
  You need to join their Discord to find the Sublime Text 4 dev channel. It's not marketed anywhere, you just have to have searched their forum for it. https://discord.gg/D43Pecu https://discord.gg/D43Pecu Sublime Text 3, as you say, has gone without dev updates since 2019 with no announcements about why or pointers to the new version. Yes, they're very bad at some of these communications issues. :D
  - wbond 6y ago
    We intentionally decided to have the dev builds for ST4 go to a smaller group of people, paired with a low-friction communication medium. Clearly you disagree with that decision, but we do communicate with our users pretty much every day. We simply decided trying to communicate and gather feedback from tens of thousands of users was less productive for a team of six than hundreds of engaged power users.
    - kemayo 6y ago
      My only disagreement with your chosen course was the lack of update on the ST3 dev builds page. As-is, it gives the impression to users like the ones I replied to that there's no progress being made. Sticking a note at the top of the ST3 dev build page akin to the one on the ST2 dev builds page, even without a link to the discord or new builds, would have changed their perception of things. Or even just a post on your news blog that you're moving active development to an upcoming version? A pinned post on your forum? There really was no communication to users who're not actively involved in the community, that I could find.

NDizzle 6y ago

Am I in the minority that I don't want to see updates monthly for a desktop application? It seems like every time I launch paint.net, for example, it wants to update. I don't want to update! I want to edit an image.

wedowhatwedo 6y ago
I completely agree.
ggregoire 6y ago
If I used paint.net 8 hours a day on daily basis as I do with VSCode, yeah I'd would probably want to keep it updated as much as possible. Also I rarely "launch" VSCode, it's always open. Which means the updates are downloaded in background and it just shows a small icon at the bottom right when it's ready to be restarted. It's almost invisible and doesn't bother me at all, and I can wait as much as I want before restarting it.
Fnoord 6y ago
Discord, an application used by ST community, suffers from exactly that as well. "Release early, release often" -- but not too often. I'm not a beta tester, I want stable software.
fomine3 6y ago
BTW paint.net has the best integrated auto updater I've ever used. It notifies at startup but has "Install When I Exit" button on update notification dialog. Of course auto update by package manager is still better. (paint.net also available on Windows Store)