Hi Magnus,
Thank you for reaching out and expressing your concerns. We really appreciate passionate users such as yourself. We are honored that millions trust us to manage their repositories and as a small team we do our best to balance delivering Sourcetree with responding to users here on Community and in tickets. We are continually working to make more resources available and improve all aspects - not just the app itself - but can certainly do better as you highlighted.
A few years ago we published a blog post that detailed our general release process and how the team approaches shipping Sourcetree to everyone. It’s largely a waterfall from alpha → beta → GA with a progressive rollout based on stated schedules; once we complete rollout then we move it to the front page. During this year’s holiday break we missed the window when it came to coordinating with the web team to post the 3.0.15 GA release and that meant it took longer than it normally does. We're sorry for the inconvenience and everything is up to date now.
When we introduced an Enterprise distribution for the Windows app, it was with the guarantee that while any version is available for download immediately, we certify that a build is reliable enough for IT to use by posting an article in the Enterprise collection. That’s why the version there might be older than what is available for download on the front page or via auto-update.
One suggestion would be to have your team members utilize the Enterprise distribution (MSI) since it disables auto-updates. This would mean in your corporate environment it can be centrally managed and users don’t end up with mismatches that create support headaches. You can subscribe to updates for that collection to know when there’s an IT recommended release and it includes the list of changes and notes directly in the article.
Typically we make release notes accessible within the app from the Help menu and point directly to that release’s section when opened. I’ve passed the request along to the web team for them to consider how it might be incorporated into the front page or elsewhere.
You raise many fair points and the logical question is - what are we going to do about them? I can’t provide an exact timeline but throughout the year we plan to:
- automate updating download URLs on the front page (coordinating with web team)
- automate version and release additions to projects in Jira (coordinating with admins)
- automate ticket linking in release notes and ensure they are to public ones only
- remove unusable references to internal tickets or projects from release notes
- review older/out of date tickets and update appropriately (single pass)
- review top tickets and update appropriately (filter with weekly scheduled session)
- review recent ticket and update appropriately (filter with weekly scheduled session)
- continue our focus on Atlassian’s security policy to ensure a safe experience
We know how frustrating and unfortunate it is to encounter an issue or oddity, especially with an app you use on a regular basis, and we apologize for those you and your team hit.
If you have a troubleshooting question or a discussion topic then Community is your one stop shop. We use it ourselves to post informative articles such as this one on debugging Sourcetree. We do our best to review and respond in all locations (Jira, Community, social media) but for prioritization, scheduling, and visibility for others to comment and vote the Jira projects (SRCTREE for Mac, SRCTREEWIN for Windows) are our source of truth and we’re going to make that more robust and clear going forward.
Cheers,
Brian Ganninger
Principal Developer, Sourcetree
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