The development of Great Cow BASIC is moving faster and faster. We have more and more developers on board to grow the libraries, improve the libraries and provide quality improvements to the tool chain, demonstrations and the Help.
Since the last release we have many changes - some major, some minor but all will add value to some users.
So, there is a need to provide a regular patch kit, in a consistent way, to share these new capabilities and improvements.
The community of developers is improving the quality of Great Cow BASIC.
Publishing the Help source here. Many of you have updated the source to the Help - thank you.
We share the Help on a daily basis. This is built and published here
Publishing the Demonstration source code here. Again, a number of the developers have added demonstrations and/or corrected the existing demonstrations.
Releases
The release of Great Cow BASIC is about every six months. We collate changes into a coherent build, package up, test and test and then publish. These releases are available for a growing range of use cases and operating systems.
Patch Kit
So, what could it be? A patch kit is a distribution that MUST be applied to an existing installation. Simple put - it would be additive to an existing installation. Unpack the patch kit distribution and then update with the new files.
The patch kit is going to contain the following mandated components
The patch kit is NOT going to contain the following components:
The patch kit would be consistent in terms of an operational toolchain. This means using the compiler and the libraries as a consistent installation is most important - you cannot, and should not, take just the compiler and not the libraries. Things could break! We do have time to figure what does not work with what. The patch kit NEEDS to be consistent in terms of an operational toolchain.
The patch kit could have little issues (as I call them.... you may call the bugs!!!) but the purpose of the patch kit is to share the ongoing development so you can leverage the investment of the community.
Summary
Look out for the patch kits soon!
Please do not use PatchKits unless you have been asked to via the Forum.