I love beta/alpha software. I thrive on it for some reason.

Obviously, the nightly builds are far from being nightly. Has the reason been officially addressed? I understand that nightly builds aren’t exactly easy to deploy because that pretty much forces the developer to work on it every single day, without a day off. Also, I am perfectly happy to go back to dev builds and not call them nightlies, I don’t want to sound like I am ungrateful and ranting “omg nightlies aren’t every night!”. If nightlies will never be truly “nightly” (or at least not for a while), can we call them something else like alpha builds? It just causes confusion.

Now, a question:

For those of us that love the most recent version possible, can there be an opt-in option (with disclaimer stating that alpha builds are susceptible to issues) allowing my copy of ST2 to check for nightly builds? I would much prefer my editor to yell at me saying “NEW NIGHTLY AVAILABLE!” instead of having to go to the website every day. Also, by having it be opt-in, this solves the issue of “the latest nightly broke my project!” because the user has to agree and know wtf a “nightly” actually means.

Did I even make any sense? I love/hate Fridays, my brain feels all jumbled these days…

Nightly builds started to avoid too many people from downloading early iterations of regular builds and then complaining about bugs. They come out fairly regularly, but there will always be gaps here and there. I don’t think “nightly” is meant literally, the name was probably chosen in a rush.

If you download and install a nightly build, for which you have to buy a license for ST, you’ll be prompted to download new nightly builds as they become available.

ST left the “alpha” stage a while ago, so calling them alpha builds would probably create confusion of its own.

More info here:

docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/ … sly-or-not

Hey, thanks for the reply.

Okay, so no official position has been taken on whether or not nightlies will ever actually be nightlies. I suspect that the wording will change fairly soon, as using the term “nightly” when talking about software development usually pretty much actually implies “every night”, like firefox nightlies. Again, if I sound like a douche, I apologize, as that’s not meant to be the case.

I agree with your position that naming them “alpha builds” will cause further confusion, so that’s probably not the best term. Also, I was unaware that nightly builds actually check for new releases! I do have a registered copy, I must just remember it incorrectly.

Again, thanks!

It’s less common for a project to have a beta,dev and nightly so I think there just isn’t a good convention for what to call them. I don’t think it needs to change because its really for a small group of people to help give testing feedback. If your the kind of person who already bought the product and already installed the nightly builds you probably understand all this and the name isn’t that important.

Alright alright, I’ll drop it.

This thread may be locked now.

‘Nightly’ isn’t an accurate moniker, but dev was already taken, and it does communicate the most important information, which is that the builds are largely untested. Furthermore, even if dev wasn’t already taken, it’s proven to be too tame a name: too many people started using dev builds without being aware of the implications, but I believe that Nightly is sufficiently scary that that shouldn’t happen.

Perhaps ‘Test’ would have been a better choice of name.

[quote=“jps”]‘Nightly’ isn’t an accurate moniker, but dev was already taken, and it does communicate the most important information, which is that the builds are largely untested. Furthermore, even if dev wasn’t already taken, it’s proven to be too tame a name: too many people started using dev builds without being aware of the implications, but I believe that Nightly is sufficiently scary that that shouldn’t happen.

Perhaps ‘Test’ would have been a better choice of name.[/quote]

Or possibly “Experimental”’.

I kind of like “May explode at any moment … you’ve been warned”, but that is a wee bit long