Well, we had some fun with Perian today. First it started when macupdate decided that they were going to post a fake 1.0 of Perian. You can read the details if you like. Since this is clearly something we didn’t want, we had to figure out how it happened. My guess is that someone saw the new website design in development within the subversion repository, clicked the download link that was there, and noticed it download a version later than what we have on the website.
In response, we restricted access to the website’s SVN repository so that only the developers can read it. This allows us to make changes there without anyone seeing anything we wish to hide. Second, we are going to use hidden URLs for our betas and appcast entries. This means that private betas will not be easily found. Now, while macupdate’s actions can be understood as an honest mistake, what they did today is another story entirely.
Today, they posted one of our beta versions, beta 5 to be exact, and as an alternate, beta 2. We have asked several times that betas not be posted. For one thing, we know of several issues with them and recognize they are not ready for release. Beta 2 has several bugs we have fixed, some serious, and beta 5 is known to crash on the AppleTV! Macupdate, these are valid reasons to not post these!
So, I went to our cachefly account, and removed all the betas. Macupdate’s response was to link their “download now” to our website (it is tempting to put in a re-write rule to redirect all access from macupdate to a page expressing our disfavor with them). So now, we need to figure out what we are going to do next. Currently, there is talk of skipping version 1.0 and just start working on the stuff for 1.1. That’s right, no 1.0 release, nada.
Stay tuned to see what we decide.