Version 1.8 / 1.8.1 of SourceTree for Windows is a bug farm - very disappointed!
Asked by Ken Stanfield:

This is not so much a question as a general statement that version 1.8 / 1.8.1 of SoureTree for Windows is one of the WORST "upgrades" I've encountered in a piece of production software.

I've already opened a couple of JIRA tickets for issues I've run up against with this new version.

Now, SourceTree is crashing after just clicking a few nodes in the tree or graph. This is really pathetic, guys. It seems like core functionality was totally compromised in this release, and I get the impression that your test suite didn't have sufficient coverage to identify these issues before you released this version to the world.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: There's been a LOT of complaints about the recent release (try clicking "questions", then "popular" here to see that 4 of the 5 highest questions are about this)

Atlassian have pulled it too - if you go to "download", you'll end up with 1.7 instead of 1.8 now.

comments: author: Ken Stanfield
body: After looking at the laundry list of core feature that no longer work in 1.8.x, I downgraded to 1.7 and order has been restored.

This release should be a cautionary tale for all software vendors anticipating a facelift that's combined with a major back-end refactoring. In general, doing this is a VERY BAD IDEA unless you have rock-solid integration and unit tests.

Clearly, Atlassian did not have sufficient test coverage.


author: Alexander Kriegisch
body: Yeah well, I wanted to downgrade to 1.7.0, but after uninstalling 1.8.1 and reinstalling 1.7.0 ST crashes on every startup. Now I have no ST anymore on Win7. ![sad](/html/@C495B4504065515364EB1894F812B34C/images/emoticons/sad.png "sad")

Where can I find the 1.8.1 download so at least I can reinstall a half-broken 1.8.1 instead of a completely non-functional system?


author: Ken Stanfield
body: I had some issues with a bad path reference to git.exe when I downgraded. I couldn't figure out what was happening until a colleague (with fresh eyes) figured out the problem. It seems like I had 2 instances of Git on my box, and SourceTree had a persisted pointer to an older version.

I nuked the older version of git.exe, and then managed to get ST 1.7.0 to point at the newer version of git.exe

Maybe you're experiencing something similar. (Maybe not...YMMV)


author: jlanam
body: Alexander, did you uninstall 1.7 as well or try to run the Repair option in the installer? found that when I went to the control panel to uninstall 1.8, that 1.7 was still listed there. I had to uninstall that as well in order to get a clean install of 1.7. Now everything works again, at least as far as I can tell.


author: larsgk
body: Thanks for the tips - finally managed to "upgrade" from 1.8 to 1.7 ... the UI also looks much better in 1.7. Was 1.8 just an ugly experiment (UI and core)?


author: Alexander Kriegisch
body: Jeff, you describe what happed at my workstation. I solved it half an hour after I had asked the question, but then forgot to write an update here. I am sorry. And thank you for your response. I have successfully downgraded to 1.7.0 and everything works fine again.


author: Ken Stanfield
body: To see some issues, just start clicking on "Remote" branches in a repository, and note that half the time, the graph window doesn't scroll to the branch. You need to repeatedly click other nodes until eventually (after 3 or 4 click) the select node scrolls into view.

Then, when you click on another branch along the left, SourceTree crashes and burns.