RE: What do you expect?

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I think I will skip the restof the thread as it was lost well before I got to this post, which says it all really:

[quote]It is extremely frustrating and nerve wrecking to have the work you've done for hours get undone because you update to a new snapshot. Almost every time I add a new contribution that requires altering the source code in some way, something goes wrong. Some contributors do not give clear instructions. They might be excellent programmers but lack skills on giving directions. Furthermore, whenever I update to a latest snapshot, I lose everything I have managed to add successfully. It shouldn't be so! I tried saving the changes to the application_top.php files under the local/configure.php but it did not seem to work. Then again, there were no instructions on how to do this or how it works (using the local/configure.php). Now, I've noticed some changes (improvements) in the coding in the lastest snapshots. That's great but . . . the contributions' coding remains unchanged! So, where the instructions say to look for this line saying so and so, the syntax has changed in the 
 new snapshots. More time consuming tasks hunting down the right lines to modify! 

So, you don't want to be like the other guys! Fine, it's your prerrogative but sharing means making it easier for others to follow and also contribute to the initiative. There is no need to let ego and arrogance blind us! Making things hard, confusing and sooooo time consuming hardly helps advance anything and being inflexible discourages most people who could greatly contribute to this project. If there are methods and tools out there already set up to make changes easier and less error prone, why not use them? If you don't like what is out there, create your own and make it available to the community. It would make your work and ours much faster and easier! 

[/quote]

Andrew