Annual public releases of sanitized code

[amaranthineApocalypse]

There are a few suggestions that would require the most up-to-date code to minimize pain and suffering, like the smell update, or updates which require newest features to be there (like footprint tracking - 2016 release doesn't have footprints).
Code snippets would also require a lot of work on the patcher's end due to the fact that newcode might use a lot of newdependencies and those newdependencies are dependant on other newdependencies and oldcode dependency breaks newcode dependency... you get the gist.

That whole "smell" thing is new, not really sure how it ties into needing the absolute latest code for initial implementation. Footprints, sure. If someone wants to work on that: just ask for the relevant code snippets from a coder.

I understand where you're coming from, I just really don't think it's actually an issue that can't be solved by "hey, can I get the code related to X as I'm working on Y (see thread Z)?".

There's actually some very incredibly major limitations to that approach.

Unless you have the full code for the feature and all of it's dependencies, you cannot compiler test or playtest your feature properly. And even if you have it, implementing it, testing everything, then removing the non-public code every single time you want to push it to your branch is a hell of a lot of work