Every 3 months or so I post about a version of Padre that is just a little more stable and a little more featureful than the normal release, and makes a good "try it out" release for people that don't use Padre but want to at least keep an eye on it.
0.47 is my next recommended release in this series.
In my opinion, this version represents Padre pulling ahead of Notepad++, Ultraedit and friends in terms of functionality. More refactoring tools are starting to appear, and some of them are actually very usable on a day to day basis (I find myself regularly using the "Lexically Rename Variable" tool).
There's still a few nigglies hanging around, but that's fairly normal for Padre features. They initially arrive hacky and broken, then after a gap in time they firm up and become reliable, then after another gap they get polished and work cleanly.
If anything is truly unique about 0.47 it's that we're seeing a transition to a new style of development. We're seeing much greater use of the bug reporting tools than we have up until now, and we've reached the point where you can reasonably write in a dozen bug reports to the bug tracker and expect ten of those to be resolved fairly quickly.
Having the bugs you report actually get fixed promptly provides a greater incentive to report more bugs.
The other change we're seeing is that Padre is starting mature beyond the CPAN. What I mean by this is that Padre is now become sophisticated enough that the functionality provided by many of the CPAN modules that it initially relied on is starting to become too crude, and more sophisticated implementations of several functions are required.
This bloats out the Padre codebase in the short term, but the hope is that once Padre's versions of certain modules become mature, we can spin this off again either as patches, replacements or alternatives to existing modules.
Some examples of modules we're growing beyond include Probe::Perl, Capture::Tiny (which is expected), and (soon) App::Ack.
This third sign that Padre is starting to reach that next level is that we're starting to accumulate modules entirely unrelated to the editor itself which are needed for building a larger ecosystem around the product.
An example of this includes our own IRC bot which is better tuned towards supporting a twin help and development channel.
Hyppolit not only deals with trac event reporting and the like, but is now also providing things like "bad language" monitoring so that we can distribute Padre to younger and more diverse audiences without the risk of the #padre channel turning into another #perl.
In summary, I highly recommend 0.47 and if you haven't tried Padre in a while you should find this a good release to become reacquainted with the editor.
Re:Failing test on OS X
Alias on 2009-09-28T03:54:37
Probably a good idea to force it in that case.
