As a roblox developer, Packages and Team Create mix about as well as oil and water.
Currently, if you hit ctrl+P to publish to a place manually while you have changes to a package, it will show this dialogue:
I am suggesting that we should be allowed to manually publish to places while there are unpublished edits to a Package.
As someone who uses both Team Create and Packages in my game, the current publishing restriction seems like a recipe for disaster at first glance, since it looks like it might cause you to lose work when you make changes outside of a packages, then close a team create place without having published your changes to the packages:
Fortunately, this isn’t the case, and Team Create will actually publish these changes automatically when you leave Team Create, because when I rejoin the place, my changes both inside and outside of the package are actually saved.
No warning showed up when I left the team create place, and I wouldn’t expect one to, because there are many reasons why roblox can randomly crash/shutdown. So it’s a good thing that there are ways by which places can be auto-published when there are unpublished changes to a package.
Avoiding Packages in my Team Create game isn’t an option for me, since I work with a large team that does edits on not only scripts, but other non-code objects and assets that are shared across a universe, and that I need to use Packages to keep consistent. Avoiding Team Create is also hardly an option, since all team members will have to make place-specific changes at the same time in different areas.
Manually publishing edits is also a must, not only in case the Team Create server randomly crashes, but also because I don’t want to have to wait for everyone in the Team Create server to leave (which often never happens at all) for me to ensure a change is published (like before I’m trying to test the game from the website, and I need to make sure my recent changes are in fact published). It doesn’t make sense that we not allowed to manually publish to places in this case if the Team Create server will automatically publish changes anyways.
On top of all this, I was recently hit with a bug (can’t show any screenshots of the studio output because roblox decided to automatically close all of my studio instances due to a new Roblox Studio update) where roblox tried to fetch the most recent version of a package (my game has 37 PackageLinks), and this request failed. This package had no changes, but because roblox was unable to determine if this package is up-to-date, I was blocked from being able to manually publish changes to this place entirely. It also cached this failed request, meaning removing and re-adding this package would show the same output error saying that the request to fetch the most recent version of the package had failed. There wasn’t a single thing I could do to publish my Team Create place manually. Luckily, my edits seemed to have been saved when I closed and re-opened Roblox Studio.
I also do not use AutoUpdate in any of my packages, but maybe AutoUpdate is part of the reason why this restriction on place publishing is in place? Regardless, AutoUpdate only seems to work if I change a package, and am actively running an instance of Roblox Studio that contains this package while the update happens; joining new places where packages are out-of-date, and AutoUpdate is on, doesn’t seem to actually automatically update these packages.
The restriction that you’re not allowed to publish to a place while there are unpublished changes to a package makes no sense to me, and I think it should be removed.