Pre-releases
Occasionally pre-releases of the software may be released, these are released to the community for 'beta testing' and early feedback on features.
As the version is is still in active development it is quite likely it will have limitations, or features incomplete, or features that may not be released, or changed for release and possibly still known bugs, so should not be used for any thing other than testing.
Also it is possible that the preferences file and even objects/patches that it produces could be incompatible with the final release version. so please keep backups of these.
(we of course will try to limit this, and if it happens we will try to provide solutions)
We would advise users to use 'versioned home' directories, so that you are able to run pre-releaes alongside the production release, more details here
Any issues/feedback on these should be reported in posts, clearly labelled as 'beta' in the topic title, so that it is clear to others that this is not for the released software.
(its likely we will create a pre-release thread for general feedback)
Of course, we want as many users to try the pre-releases as possible this greatly helps our testing efforts and provides useful early feedback on new features.
Building from directly from source in Github
Our general expectation is that this is only done by users with some development experience, as we have limited resources to support users setting up development environments, or the oddities that may come from building software.
Therefore it is generally not recommend for non-developers to access new functionality, we would prefer you wait for pre-releases.
(of course we recognise for some non-supported platforms this may be a necessary evil, and will help as much as possible)
The source code in the github repository is active development code. In particular the master branch is the main line development (though sometimes we may make use of feature branches).
(yes, we are fully aware of how to use branching, and feature release branch to minimise this... and will do this where we think its appropriate)
This means it is highly likely that the code may contain experimental features, and existing features may not be currently working correctly (as they are in-flux due to new developments), and whilst we try to keep the development branch as stable as possible, at any point in time there may be major issues introduced, which we cannot guarantee a timeline for fixing (except it will be before release 
)
It is also very possible that the preferences file created will be incompatible with the release versions, and also possibly patches and objects.
(we will not provide upgrade paths through development to release versions only from release to release.)
if you are using a development or pre-release and you encounter issues, its is vital if you find issue you provide detailed bug reports... this will help us deliver high quality 'official releases'
please review our bug reporting guidelines
