Once again you are making my point for me…
First and foremost I am trying hard not to bash on Plex, again I have been here since almost the very start… but again it was free and helping them develop and test was a community effort
however that is the latest business model these days… look how many companies have done this now over the last 10 years… get others to develop and test your ‘community’ project then close it off and start charging… or sell it or a commercial concern… not cool to those that ‘worked’ for free…
But as you so specifically nailed it… this has nothing to do with DoD spec… it has to do with this generations idea of what engineering is…
After coding for the AF in the early '90s. I got to fly jets for 15 years of my career… the aircraft we built in the 50’s were more reliable and better (smarter) engineered than the ones we have today… it has a bit to do with compexity … but to be honest plex, just like some dod projects just got too complex because of a lack of engineerings ability to plan and simplify before starting… you have to plan before you code, today everyone just wants to sit at a console and code / patch / code / get complaints/ patch / core … rinse repeat… there is no planning… that is the boring hard part. … good systems analysis … coding in the middle and most important … .a testing plan that tests at a minimum critical functionality
your point of pulling redundancy along the same part of the airframe is a perfect point… the spec calls for 4 redundant channels… a smart engineer knows that means that the 4 channels should be survivable and separates them… a lazy one pulls all 4 in the same bundle… both met the spec but only one is a solution…
This is not just a problem at plex… vmware of late is just as guilty… their code is riddled with bugs, their current release is not manageable with their own front end tools, and the different management interfaces all have different layouts, the perfomance monitoring charts all have different scales… disk activity on the host app might be kb/s while the VCSA appliance displays the same metric as MB/s … just poor design the product should be seamless… just a lack of planning, coordination…
Now… back to plex… if you cant make the basics work… than stop development on new features and fix the base system first… or have a new team and a parallel code and release base.
If you are going to build new features than baseline the working code and make that available to those that don’t want to have their install destroyed.
Right now the only options for a plex pass user is the bleeding edge of instability with plex pass version or the general release without plex pass functionality …
If you cant keep up… than make available the previous versions or revisions…
Fix bugs at a baseline 's prior build while also advanceing other forks…
So lets say that we are happy-ish with 1.2.3.XXXX… than you call 1.2.3.xxxx. Baseline 1.2.3.xxxx and keep bug fixing only that baseline while you continue to release others that may seek to change actual functionality … but you have to be able to download prior versions if a full test plan is not in place so that downgrading to official code is possible… having to pull previous versions from 3rd parties is too risky these days especially when you have to enter plex pass credentials… so plex must start allowing us to download past versions…
This over simplified download strategy is not going to service its customers when even basic things get realeased with issues…
Perfect example is the latest snafu with the web interface on editing tags… that should have been caught… it has nothing to do with media versions or moving targets… it is a basic core function that was broken, never tested and pushed out to the install base… so now only online users with accounts and access to plex.tv can fix and edit tags until the next release since there is not repo to download the working prior version…
Oh and the prior version corrupted peoples databases with incorrect xml data during media analysis so we have to go back 2-3 realeases to get to one that worked… seee my point…