Belated introduction and a couple of questions

[Robert Bodily]

Hello all,

I submitted a patch a couple of weeks or so ago but have now realized that
while I briefly introduced myself to Dirk on the ScubaBoard forums, I didn't
introduce myself here.

On the programming side, I wrote my first real program back in 1980.  It was
in Fortran and was on punch cards because terminals were a limited resource
at the university and were reserved for the upper classes.  Over the years
I've written code in most of the popular languages, from 8085/Z80/x86
assembler to Basic, Java, C/C++, C# and Javascript, and on operating systems
from Windows 3.1 through 10, OS/2, and a little bit of Unix/AIX/Xenix (sorry
Linus but no actual Linux experience :-( ).  Professionally, most of my
recent work in the last decade or so has been on Windows using C# with a bit
of HTML & JS (although I still have to dust off my C++ skills every now and
then).

On the diving side, I'm a relatively new diver having started diving
seriously only within the last two years. I was initially certified in 2013
but it wasn't until my oldest son got certified and I had a ready-made dive
buddy that I began diving more frequently.  We did our first liveaboard last
year in the Caribbean and are very much looking forward to September this
year when we're doing two weeks at Truk Lagoon.  We're pretty much in the
exact middle of the US, landlocked on all sides, so we have to satisfy
ourselves with lake diving otherwise.  We just did our first dives of the
season last weekend and I'll be very glad when the lake settles down as it
usually does later in the year because viz was not more than about 2-3 feet
(less than a meter for my non-Imperial unit friends).

I greatly appreciate all of the work that everyone has put into creating
Subsurface.  My son and I dive with Liquivision Lynx computers and their
software is severely lacking in features so I'm really grateful that I can
use Subsurface to import my logs.

Unfortunately (or quite fortunately, depending on how it's viewed :-)), my
work is keeping my quite busy currently and for the foreseeable immediate
future so while I definitely have the inclination and curiosity, I don't
have the time to install a Linux VM and learn it and the GCC toolchain to
build Subsurface locally.  Since it directly affects me, I did manage to
find some time to fix a few things in the Liquivision import section which I
tested by isolating that file in a test harness from a Visual Studio project
on Windows.

Which brings me to my questions:

1) Is there any way to know what changes are contained in an install image
from the dev/test builds section of the website?  The reason I ask is that
the current Windows build (subsurface-4.6.4-195-g5c1d67e0c1e6.exe) is dated
2017-06-15 and the file I patched (core/liquivision.c) also shows that it
was checked in on the same day but the issues that I addressed in the patch
do not appear to be resolved with this version so I don't know if the build
occurred before or after the patch was applied.

2) Is there any schedule for builds, either dev/test or release?  I see on
the dev/test builds web page that it's "whenever Dirk remembers to do so"
and I understand that Dirk, Linus, and many others have been working
diligently to get BLE comms working so I do not mean for this to interfere
with that work.  At the same time, from an admittedly purely selfish
standpoint, I'm currently unable to use Subsurface to import my divelogs
because one of the issues I fixed is a fatal buffer overflow that occurs
during import.  So, assuming that my patch didn't make the last build, I'd
really like to get my hands on a build that contains that patch.

Thanks again everyone.  I do hope one day to be able to contribute more to
the project.

Robert