[Scilab-users] Scilab 5.4 Release

[Blee, Patrick]

Hi,

Firstly, congrats on the development - certainly a mammoth task but the continual improvement of Scilab/xcos environment is clearly evident !

Whilst I start on a positive note, I'm afraid to report my journey to Scilab/Xcos, through Scicos, has been fraught with difficulties.
The main one has always been stability.
Firstly, the improvement in the user environment going from 5.3.x to 5.4.x has been immense.
However, none of the versions I have downloaded have been stable - scilab has always bombed out when I was modifying an xcos file or indeed an xcos subsystem has corrupted the simulation and, again, crashed scilab.

I briefly tried the most up-to-date 5.4 version yesterday (nightly build)  - but it had no help files - while 5.4 beta 3 suffered the 5-10 minute drop-out.

This is frustrating as there is so much potential in the package - particularly in how it links in so many user-contributed toolboxes.

Whilst the above may sound negative, believe me, it is not intended to be - I think this package is going to take Simulation tools to an interesting place !

I have 2 questions today:
i)      Have you an idea as to when v5.4 will reach the end of the present development phase and be bug-free?
ii)     Is the long-term plan to hand over/sell Scilab to a Corporate player, introducing a pricing strategy?
(This would be a concern from my perspective as the Open-Architecture and Freeware nature of the package to date is a real attraction to the Student/Hobby fraternity - possibly encouraging people to enter the field of Engineering down the line).

Best of luck with the on-going development and I hope to hear from you soon,

Patrick



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.scilab.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20120925/ee47767a/attachment.htm>