dev version strings and updates

[Bloke]

During development of a major version, we set $version to the next release (with a -dev suffix) and $txp_is_dev to true. Arguably they are duplications of effort. We could for example, set the version string to the next version and programmatically add the suffix when we deal with updating / comparing version strings by testing $txp_is_dev. That might be something we consider as part of this Issue, but it's potentially just an aside.

The main problem is that, currently, each time after update is run on a dev setup (whenever an update file has changed) the version string in txp_prefs is updated, but it takes on the major version number, not the suffixed one. This then prevents future updates from running, since the version strings match.

It may also affect people who have downloaded and tested dev now, as their version string will already be at the next major release, so when they upgrade to the final version, the update script will not run.

So we need a two-part solution:

• Only update the version string in the database if not dev: is this as simple as wrapping a $txp_is_dev test around the update part? Or is there some other test that's failing earlier because $thisversion has a suffix?
• Fix alpha tester's installations who have already been affected.

The latter might be to communicate that people just need to manually reset their version string to a previous version after they have pulled a dev branch that fixes the former issue. Or we might find a different solution that's less hassle (e.g. that sets the version string in their database with a correctly suffixed version string).

Anyone any thoughts on how we might tackle this? Code welcome...

[Bloke]

Addressed by 2dff863 and http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?pid=303393#p303393.