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[State of Mesquite] [Why doesn't Mesquite do X, Y or Z?] [Things to think about] [Getting help] [Reporting bugs and requesting advice] [Separate page on known problems in Mesquite]
Mesquite is in beta-test form, meaning that we're seeking user feedback to learn what areas need the most work. We expect there to be quite a few bugs reported initially. Some known problems are listed here.
Mesquite calculations aren't quite ready for publishable results, though some are very close. The beta-testing will help us determine how close they are, but we hope to indicate what calculations are ready over the next two or three months. In the meantime please feel free to explore the system, and use it in teaching.
If you do wish to use results from Mesquite in publications, please be in contact with us, and we can determine if those features you wish to use are stable and bug-free enough.
Mesquite is extensible. What it can do now is a small part of what we envisage. We welcome suggestions but we're aware of many things that could be added. The biggest needs we feel at the moment are for likelihood calculations and more tools for examining character correlations.
Of course, if you really want a new feature sooner than we can add it, you are welcome to write your own module to implement the feature.
Mesquite is a large project, about 1500 pages of source code when printed single spaced at 7 point font (about 120,000 or more lines of source; over 5MB of ASCII text). We don't have a big team of people working on it; it was initially written by a single person, and now two. We apologize for the bugs that remain, and look forward to your polite bug reports and efforts to aid us make Mesquite useful.
Mesquite is free. We don't have a support staff to answer questions, fix bugs, and so on.
Mesquite is intended to become a community effort. We plan to release source code as soon as we can figure out an appropriate license and get the source organized for release. We hope other programmers will help us improve the system.
We recognize that Mesquite is a complex system that offers many choices to the user. We plan to build macros and other tools to help build paradigmatic analyses for users who don't want to sort their way through options every time. However, they're not built yet.
Mesquite doesn't have conventional documentation, but it does have various features to help you learn how to use it. Check out the help page for instructions.
Partly to foster a community of users, and partly for efficiency, we are encouraging users to sign up to a LISTSERV via which they can report bugs and post queries about using Mesquite. Please report bugs and ask for Mesquite advice via this LISTSERV. To sign up for the listserv, send an email with the following message in the body of the email:
subscribe MESQUITELIST YourFirstName YourSecondName
to
listserv@listserv.arizona.edu
where you replace "YourFirstName" by your first name, and "YourSecondName" by your second name. Once you've signed up, you can send a message to the list.
If you're reporting a bug, it's important that you are able to specify, as precisely as possible, exactly what you did that generated the bug. Try to find a precisely repeatable series of actions thta generate the bug. In any bug report, please specify the version of Mesquite and any important modules and your operating system. Be prepared to send us your data file so we can test the problem.
(Of course, we recognize that some messages may be more appropriately directed directly to us. You may contact Wayne Maddison directly at wmaddisn@u.arizona.edu).