by Rachael » Sun Dec 02, 2018 4:02 am
I am pretty much in agreement with Graf. As I said, dev builds were never meant for regular playing. Especially not for such an extended period of time - 2.2 pre is OLD. That's before ZScript, even. That's even before GZDoom moved to this site officially. So that's 2 years, at least.
The original purpose of providing dev builds was to get bug reports. I can understand, and am not against, people keeping certain ones for sentimental value or what have you, but the appeal for them is much wider than originally intended - and sure, that's not such a bad thing because it means more bug reports come in quicker, but it also has the disadvantage that mods are often developed on them, and we have people asking for old ones when we have hundreds, if not half a thousand per year if you count forks, we just don't keep that many around. If a person actually kept every single Q/G/ZDoom SVN/Devbuild since DRD's site for them was first created, plus Nash's public builds before that, you'd easily fill up a 1TB hard drive.
Naturally that means they go through prunes, most often semi-annually at least - and anything deleted in the prune is lost forever, unless someone kept a backup somewhere.
Also - if you are the kind of person who downloads a lot of dev builds, and you don't delete old downloads frequently, and you're suffering disk space issues - check your downloads folder - you might be sitting on a golden opportunity to reclaim some of that space back.
I am pretty much in agreement with Graf. As I said, dev builds were never meant for regular playing. Especially not for such an extended period of time - 2.2 pre is OLD. That's before ZScript, even. That's even before GZDoom moved to this site officially. So that's 2 years, at least.
The original purpose of providing dev builds was to get bug reports. I can understand, and am not against, people keeping certain ones for sentimental value or what have you, but the appeal for them is much wider than originally intended - and sure, that's not such a bad thing because it means more bug reports come in quicker, but it also has the disadvantage that mods are often developed on them, and we have people asking for old ones when we have hundreds, if not half a thousand per year if you count forks, we just don't keep that many around. If a person actually kept every single Q/G/ZDoom SVN/Devbuild since DRD's site for them was first created, plus Nash's public builds before that, you'd easily fill up a 1TB hard drive.
Naturally that means they go through prunes, most often semi-annually at least - and anything deleted in the prune is lost forever, unless someone kept a backup somewhere.
Also - if you are the kind of person who downloads a lot of dev builds, and you don't delete old downloads frequently, and you're suffering disk space issues - check your downloads folder - you might be sitting on a golden opportunity to reclaim some of that space back.