DraftSight: A Painless Upgrade, and a Touch of Class

Dassault Systèmes just published a notice about a DraftSight upgrade, and I performed the upgrade with some trepidation. Often, upgrades of free software are not clean or painless. To my delight, this upgrade was both clean and painless.

I did notice this one nice touch: The DS installer detected some programs I had running that used files it would need to interact with during the upgrade. It listed the programs and invited me to close them before continuing.

Some installers give you the "It is recommended that you close all running programs before you continue" warning, which is appreciated but sometimes a real annoyance. Other installers, really poorly-written ones, simply clobber the overlapping files without warning, irreversibly screwing up your computer. I've never encountered an installer with the philosophy of this DraftSight installer. I like it.

This is a major upgrade, by the way. The version numbering syntax changed with this upgrade. My old version was 11.3.1131. The new version is V1R1.2 (Version 1, Release 1.2).