Yes, I understand it’s being developed by just @mrm and as I said, I want him to do it right. And I greatly appreciate his thoroughness and transparency. I’m still subscribed. But now we know of at least three people who aren’t currently subscribed due to lack of stable updates.
I would encourage @mrm for future development to think about ways to do more stable releases even when it causes some code duplication and is slightly less efficient. For example could he have gotten a 2.0 stable release with an extra month of effort while he was already starting 2.1 development? I don’t know. But if yes, then I think it would have been worth it. Besides encouraging more subscribers, I suspect more stable releases also encourage more forum interaction and help focus his development efforts. Timelines are extremely difficult to estimate, and I doubt @mrm ever expected another stable release to take this long, either, but the fact remains that it has.
Concerning why I don’t install alpha
I haven’t installed alpha because @mrm strongly discourages me from doing so in Alpha, beta, stable, and latest; What should you use?. Also as he says, “It’s no fun to run buggy software!” Also it’s not just me you need to convince, it sounds like you’re encouraging everyone to run alpha so they have the latest and greatest features.
If the current alpha is truly just as stable as the 1.1 release, then @mrm should mark it as stable or even just beta. But he isn’t, which means he still expects substantial changes which may for example force full library rebuilds, make the library inaccessible, or even require actually restoring from backup. Stuff that’s “no fun”.
My backup is on a hard drive at a friend’s place, so updating the backup and restoring from backup are pretty inconvenient, but it works for me since I rarely change my files. It’d be cool to set up two Synology NAS’s at different locations to automatically sync, but the risk/benefit isn’t worth it to me at this time when my files rarely change anyway.