Eraser 5.8.7-beta 4 Standard and Portable

[Joel]

Hello,

Happy new year to everyone! I'm pleased to announce that Eraser 5.8.7-beta 4 is ready for download. It includes multiple feature fixes and should add to overall stability.

Read the full announcement and download it from there.

Joel

[greyowl]

I have a limited amount of hard drive space on my computer so I don't want to use approx. 500mb for .NET Framework so that I can use Eraser 6.

I am wondering if v. 5 will be maintained going into the future?

[Overwriter]

I have a limited amount of hard drive space on my computer so I don't want to use approx. 500mb for .NET Framework so that I can use Eraser 6.

I understand the desire for minimal installations. I like the minimalist approach ! However if you are down to the last 500MB of drive space I suggest you invest in a new hard drive or even a flash drive. If however your concern is the 500MB .Net installation I am right behind you. Although us old timers have to accept that this is the future !!

I am wondering if v. 5 will be maintained going into the future?

No V5 has had a feature freeze since early 2008. Quite a lot of bug fixes have been written by Joel over the last year but that is all they will be, bug fixes.

V6 is the future, we have to accept that. I am a slow adopter too. Just hang in there my friend and trust Joel’s work, he may be young, very young but he is gifted !

[greyowl]

Thanks for the information.

So it sounds like v. 5 will still work ok, but won't have all the great features that v. 6 can offer.

I don't know enough about .NET Framework to know if it would be a good investment of space on my computer and whether it would be used by other apps in the future. It is hard to justify the space for one app when there are alternatives.

[Overwriter]

So it sounds like v. 5 will still work ok, but won't have all the great features that v. 6 can offer.

V5 was good, very good in its day. However it suffered patch on patch repairs. V6 is a total re-write by someone who knows what they are doing.

Use V5 by all means, it works ! Eraser V6 won’t have many if any new functionalities until V6.2.

[greyowl]

Thanks again for the info and advise. I appreciate it.

[Joel]

.NET should use less than 500MB - something in the league of 150MB IIRC. I am all for the minimalist approach too - except that in our case .NET is something used by quite a large number of programs and should be installed by almost everyone now. Vista comes packaged with it (.NET 3.0, but we depend on 3.5 which is just a small step up) and that's what made me think that adoption should be pretty good.

Microsoft is supporting .NET development. Chances are, there will be more applications written in .NET with time. Office, for one, has .NET plugin support. Although most applications will still be using native code, .NET will definitely become more popular with time and more applications will use it. Paint.NET is written in C#.

Joel

[Joel]

I am wondering if v. 5 will be maintained going into the future?

No V5 has had a feature freeze since early 2008. Quite a lot of bug fixes have been written by Joel over the last year but that is all they will be, bug fixes.

Please allow me to clarify.

v5 will be maintained in the sense that bugs and security fixes will still be fixed. However, new features as part of maintenance will not be present in v5. Features implemented in v6 will not be ported back to v5. After v6 is publicly released v5 will be branched and v6 will replace it as the stable.

Joel

[greyowl]

Joel,

Thank you for the explanation of the value of .NET--something I need to consider going forward.

The Readme on .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 has a hardware requirement of 620mb on system drive, see link below:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... Readme.htm

This is what I was going by re space on hard drive.

[gbjennings]

Hi, Joel;

As I mentioned to you in ICQ, I, for one, am perfectly happy with V5 and I want to thank you for keeping it in maintenance mode. V5 does everything I want and need from an eraser utility, and with a considerably smaller footprint than V6. 'Wave of the future' or not (and I have plenty of .net applications installed), I will always go for the smaller footprint, everything else being equal.

Thanks again !

[greyowl]

Can I install v.5.8.7-beta4 over v.5.86.1 or should I uninstall the old version first?

Do I need to install the Certificate for betas first?

Note: the Certificate link on the Installing Betas webpage does not work.

[Joel]

v5 doesn't require you to install the beta certificate, though if you do the binaries will show up as signed. It is a good to have, but not necessary for operation.

You will have to remove 5.86.1 before installing 5.8.7.

Joel

[greyowl]

Thanks for the clarification.

Is the certificate link now fixed?

[Joel]

What certificate link? The Eraser Root CA? It's part of the InstallingBetas page which I posted with the v6 announcement. I didn't include it here as it isn't necessary for v5 testers.

Joel

[greyowl]

It is the "Download the certificate" link on the webpage below:

http://eraser.heidi.ie/trac/wiki/InstallingBetas