On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 11:15 AM, Brynn <brynn@...3133...> wrote:

I don't understand this: "We really shouldn't be distributing them as an official thing for a stable release update when the original release in question didn't have them." And don't even worry about explaining. I'm sure it's a "developer thing". My point is that most users probably don't understand it either. And more importantly, that users should have access to all versions of Inkscape, from a single source. And since inkscape.org serves users and devs alike, it makes sense to me that all the versions should be linked -- at least from the same site, if not the same page. It seems reasonable to me that a link to the 64-bit version could be in a separate paragraph, perhaps even titled "unofficial version" if such a distinction is necessary. In my experience, I think most users would expect to find it with all the other versions, and would be surprised not to find it.

You say to not worry about explaining, but since you don't understand it would likely be helpful if I did explain. At the time the downloads page was updated there was no current 64-bit build available. That's the simple reason one wasn't immediately available. The 64-bit builds should really be considered "beta" at this point, which is why we didn't hold off announcing the release for them. The testing on them is minimal at best and it is a new architecture (for us, on windows) with the potential for it's own quirks which we aren't yet aware of. It's difficult for us to say something is a recommended "stable" release if it's really not as mature as the other releases we have available. So, while users may just see 64-bit or 32-bit, they would likely want to know that one is less tested.

Re: "Are people willing to deal with 64bit build specific issues in a timely fashion?" I should explain that I don't understand much about trunks and branches and forks and builds (I really only had to join the mailing list to get edit access to the wiki). But it was my understanding that the 64-bit version was identical to the 32-bit version, except for being multi-threaded. And again, please don't feel obligated to explain, because I know you're busy. It's just that based on my simplistic understanding -- how many 64-bit specific issues could there be?

That's the beauty... we have no clue how many 64-bit specific issues there could be. We already have plenty of issues specific to Win32, OSX, Linux, and in this case it could be a whole host of unique quirks in Win64 builds for us to get familiar with and have to fix. While it won't be completely unique from Win32, there is a good chance that there could be issues specific to the libraries used in the 64bit builds. In other words, it's likely that the 64-bit builds will have issues separate from the 32-bit builds just due to the difference in age of the libraries.

Cheers,

Josh