I did a little research and found out that Rock is another framework and a successor to Ace2, and right after I have updated my addons with WoWAceUpdater today, I noticed several changes. Basically, several addons have integrated Rock as their framework, such as PitBull, Parrot, CowTip, FuBar.

I then tried to install a few new addons, PitBull basically didn't work at all, and my UnitFrames were reverted back to Blizzard UnitFrames. Addons that clashed with PitBull were CosPlay and GlowFoSho (both I installed today and PitBull wasn't working as intended, so as I uninstalled them, PitBull was happy again), of course they are many other addons out there might clash with PitBull too.

Then, Omen wasn't showing up my threat on the meter but others, hence I pulled agro several times in raid. I have reinstalled Omen and Threat-1.0, I have also deleted Omen.lua and Omen.lua.bak, restarted my WoW but Omen still didn't show my threat.

So, my question is,
1. Is anyone else having the same problem? How did you fix yours?
2. Also, how do you remove the Rock button sitting next to my simpleMinimap?
3. Lastly, is installing addons without externals better than with externals?

Any helps are appreciated.

Can't answer 1, sorry... haven't used the mods much since the update.

As for 2, there's no way in the rock configuration to remove the minimap button. You can either use a script command every time you logon [ /script <minimap Button Frame>:Hide() ] or hide it with Visor (replace the <minimap Button Frame> with the name of the Rock Minimap Button). As for 3, at the moment I'd recommend loading all of your mods with externals for a while, as the new rock libs aren't in the standalonelibs package yet.

As I understand this is not quite true. Rock (previously known as Joker) is not a successor, its a split. CKKnight has split from the Ace framework and chosen not to work on the development of Ace3. He's developing a completely new framework.

Speaking of which, I'd love to find a way to hide that annoying Rock minimap icon. Anyone found the setting?

Quick summary of addon frameworks:

Addon frameworks are developement tools for addon authors to allow them to easily and centrally coordinate common tasks in code. (Stuff like parsing the combat log, for instance, or initializing a new frame object.) Ideally this leads to more efficient and bug free solutions to common problems, pragmaticly it leads to small errors being duplicated in many projects. Ace, Ace2, Ace3, Rock, Dongle, Sea - are all common frameworks for wow addons that you may have seen or used.

Quick summary of what's going on in frameworks atm:

In the recent past the avg user has had two or three active frameworks at a time that were widely available, depending on how you decide to count. The arrival of the WowAceUpdater, and the very good for distribution (from the end-user's pov) SVN storage method have tended to pull more users to the Ace2 Framework. As a result, that framework has had an increasingly large community of users and a byproduct of that is an increasing interest in _learning_ to develope for that framework. Of course, it's a small step from developing an addon that uses the framework, to thinking "gee this should be part of the framework" and as a result of that growth and some general lassitude induced by being wildly successful the framework (Ace2) has had some signifigant feature creep. Recently this has been a cause of boring drama between developers over some mythical "vision" of what the framework should do, or how Ace2 was broken, or even the occasional legitimate bug that could not be fixed due to feature creep and compatibility concerns. At some point a decision was made to start work on the third iteration of this addon framework.

Summary of what is going on in the near future:

Consensus seems to be that "fixing" Ace2 would require breaking backwards compatibility, and that would be a generally bad idea as an upgrade, no matter how widely publicized. Instead, the original (and subsequent) developers for the Ace2 project have decided to rewrite their framework with the lessons learned in the process included. Unfortunately for end users (as it adds confusion) the major developers involved have a meaningful difference of opinion regarding fundamental framework responsibilities and methods. CKK, Rock and Co are in favor of building an Ace2 similiar project entitled Rock, but with many fixes for current bugs and a better job of standardization among parts (think Dominos). The Ace3 Team (Kai, Tek, others) are in favor of building a new framework from the bottom up, with a heavy emphasis on modular library blocks (think legos) and keeping the core small. Both teams now view libraries as something that should be framework independant, and will be attempting to standardize the common ones outside of the framework if at all possible. Please note that neither team's solution will be inherently superior - they want to do different things, and provide those things to addon authors with minimal fuss.

What Does This Mean For Me, Joe Casual, Addon User:

Not much. Use the addons you like, don't use the addons you don't like. Expect a bit of delay as the authors swap (or don't) frameworks to find the ones they like. If they port, expect to do some bug reporting. Lastly, you should expect (as with all things) to see some addons die off here. Try to remember that they'd likely have died just the same had the frameworks not been changed, as addons die all the time.

Where can I find out more?

Well the best place to keep an eye on this particular branch of addon-ville is the forums and Irc attached to wowace.com. You can find their main site at www.wowace.com, and from there it should be a simple task to find the forums or irc.

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Now, to answer your questions:

1 - no.
2 - I used visor - ckk (rock's author) has been asked to make an option to hide or fubar that icon, and it should hit the next version as it's relatively trivial to do.
3 - Better is such an odd term. I prefer to install without externals, as I manage my libraries manually. For the average user asking this question though, I'd say to install with externals simply to keep your addon folder neatly grouped. Your choice impacts your load time by less than 10 seconds in most cases, and that time for most users is only when they first enter the game.

All my stuff was broken aswell, so I reverted back to an older version

Giving it another few days.

In my case, this was due to standalone libraries not being updated by the Ace updater. Installed the missing libs manually and everything seems to work normally, except Pitbull alt auras which is said to be not (yet) compatible with the new version of Pitbull.

I had complaints about AceEvent not being found if I had any version of Rock installed.

I use Pitbull, FuBar and Parrot and updated my addons today using WAU without any problems. I install/update without externals and have automatic dependency download enabled.

Came home late from work, updated as always, went to the raid and baaaam, UI gone.

Ok fixed it by using WoWAceUpdater instead of JWoWUpdater and now I'm up running again, with a few sprinkled errors from Cartographer, no major showstopper.

It may be just me but my game feels to run smoother, as if I'd gained 10fps (no my FPS indicator shows nothing different). Very weird. I might be seeing things hastening home from work.

I noticed that having Natur's Enemy Cast Bar enabled has the same effect of Pitbull not loading at all now.

Because, despite the name, the WoWAce SVN repository is not restricted solely to Ace addons.

As to being in the updater - because WAU pulls from the SVN repository, so there's essentially no difference between on the site and in the updater.

Hi people, ckknight here.

Sorry for all the kerfuffle that's been caused. Hopefully it'll settle down in a day or so, this is one of the problems with cutting-edge software - sometimes you'll be the one to get cut.

Malan, you're wrong, by the way. Rock came before Ace3 and others decided to go against it because of their own personal vendettas. I created Rock in the same spirit that I created Ace2 (well, I wrote about 85% of it), Rock was just a continuation of it. So, from my perspective, they split from me rather than the other way around.

sadris, what's the error, please?

Opioid, WAU and wowace is not a place to get stable addons, it's a place for developers to share code and ideas. Expecting stability in this environment seems a folly.

This is a different error than what I got last night, it happens when I right click on the Rock Config minimap icon. I do have embedded libraries. Version of Parrot is:
Parrot is the only addon I have which uses Rock; I downgraded FuBar and Cartographer to the September 7th releases because of the "missing AceEvent" errors.

Oh I wasn't trying to indicate any order in the events. Just stating there was a split in viewpoints.

I've been experiencing some strange issues with Rock today as well;

As soon as I updated via WAU I started to get a lot of errors, especially from Pitbull and Parrot.
I solved it by removing all my add ons and installing them from scratch.

However, I still can't uncheck some boxes in Rock, like Aura functions in Pitbull.

Can we keep the drama off these boards please?

All we really care about is how to keep all our addons working together.

I've always wondered, would it be possible to add a flag to certain releases considered 'fully stable'? And then an option in the updater to ignore non stable releases?

I myself enjoy the cutting edge aspect of WAU, but I think that if you were to make 'stable releases' the default WAU behaviour, alot of people would stop complaining. (Lets admit it, WAU is slowly turning into the old Cosmos updater for alot of people, and this will only increase as times goes on)

It's already built into SVN thats what the tags folder is for, so when you reach a stable point in development you can tag that version and release it.

Sorry I created this thread to get some help, and I apologise for giving a mere brief introduction of Rock.

@jitka, thanks, I'll try [/script <minimap Button Frame>:Hide()] to hide it.
@ckknight, thanks for dropping by and explaining the current situation. Shall we keep the error(s) coming as you go about fixing? I guess we just have to wait a few days to see.

I wasnt referring to you.

No need to apologize about reporting a major change or major bug or even the history behind the code fork. I was attempting to stop a flame war before it got out of hand.

Strangely enough, I tried to install everything WITHOUT externals and I don't get any errors now, just have to see if Omen works now.