Regarding v4.38beta

There has been a long-standing, hard-to-reproduce bug in RPGMaker Trans whereby for some people, patches or portions of patches were erased. For translators, this it is of course a massive inconvenience if your work goes up in smoke.

The bug turned out to be hard-to-reproduce as it only effects case-insensitive file systems, and all of my work is done on Linux. I'm still not entirely certain on the precise cause of the bug within RPGMaker Trans, as I had thought that I was handling the case-insensitive filesystem case correctly. The next best thing to a fix however is a mitigation, which is included in RPGMaker Trans v4.38. If RPGMaker Trans v4.38-beta detects a situation where data loss due to this bug is going to occur, it aborts execution. However, this might be annoying for those who just want to patch a game.

Therefore, my recommendation for now is:

1. If you are a translator, use RPGMaker Trans v4.38-beta
2. If you just want to patch a game, use RPGMaker Trans v4.37

I am hopeful that RPGMaker Trans v5, which rewrites the file IO portions with something hopefully more robust, will fix the problem.