On Wednesday 19 April 2006 02:59, Aaron Krister Johnson wrote:

> Let me be clear--I'm not trying to discourage anyone from using version 5. I 
> too am excited to test Csound5 and get it up and running!
> 
> I'm just illustrating that it might be hasty to push distributions to offer 
> Csound5 to the exclusion of Csound4, which is very well tested and stable at 
> this point.

Actually, having Csound 5 in the package repositories of major distributions
is useful exactly because it makes it easier for users to get it to work
without having to compile from sources or worrying about distribution specific
issues and dependencies.
4.23 is also very outdated now, it is more than 3 years old, and it is not a
very attractive choice for new users when other, more modern synthesis packages
are also available. Csound has already stalled way too long at this version,
and I think a lot of users were lost for this reason.
As I already mentioned, you can use 4.23 as long as you want, no one takes it
away from you; but declaring the newer version "broken" just because there are
rare cases when the older one works better - ignoring a large number of cases
when it is the other way around - is not reasonable. Following this logic,
distributions would never have switched from using gcc 2.7, kernel 2.0, libc5,
and so on, because it cannot be guaranteed that everything will keep working
in 100.0 % of cases. I am not trying to say that this is an excuse to have
regressions, or that they should not be fixed, it is just not realistic to
expect that new problems are never introduced at all in a large, complex
software package. You should also take into account the overall quality of
each version: a large number of errors have been fixed (obviously you do not
care because you are used to live with them), and from a new user's point of
view, it is no longer so obvious that 4.23 is the "stable, well tested" release
and 5.01 is "buggy beta unsuitable for production use".
Last, but not least, there is no reason not to offer both versions side by
side: it is often done with other packages, too.


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