Re: nomenclature of tidy.exe

On 6 Mar 2001, at 12:26, Peter Evans wrote:

> A fair number of messages here take some trouble to distinguish between
> different versions of tidy.exe (the Win32 binary). 

Differentiating versions is certainly important, as many bugs are fixed and 
new features are added in each release of HTML Tidy.  On a number of 
occasions, someone reporting a problem has been using an older version, and 
their problem had been fixed in the latest release.  Platforms, too, are 
important, as some behaviors (e.g., implicit configuration files) are 
specific to certain platforms.  Those are two vital pieces of information 
that help list members help others.


> As I'm a non-programmer and haven't contributed anything whatever to the
> development of Tidy, any suggestion of mine for it might well be
> impertinent (as well as uninformed and stupid). 

I cannot see any suggestion for improving the product as being impertinent 
or stupid (uninformed...perhaps, as to the utility of the enhancement or 
the level of difficulty involved in its implementation).  Please always 
feel free to suggest anything that might yield a better Tidy!


> Yes, when you run the program you can see which version it is. But in
> addition to this, how about distributing the binary not simply as
> tidy.exe but instead compressed within tidy20000430.zip.... 

Versioning an archive containing the executable would, perhaps, be helpful 
in ensuring that the current version was downloaded (the source archives 
are already so versioned).  For example, until recently the Win32 
executable available from the Tidy site was the April 2000 version -- two 
versions out of date.  A versioned archive of the executable might have 
prevented that particular problem.

However, one advantage to distributing the executable directly, instead of 
encapsulated in an archive, is that it does not require the presence of, 
e.g., WinZip on the user's Win32 platform.  The program is ready to run 
once downloaded.

But the problem that you cite is really that folks don't report their 
version, etc., when posting problems.  As you note, Tidy reports its 
version when it runs, but often people fail to provide that information 
when sending messages to the list.  I'm unsure how versioning an executable 
archive would help that specifically.

                                      -- Dave

Received on Tuesday, 6 March 2001 02:14:31 UTC