Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> To complement that with even more user testing, I think we should
> consider advertising specific (late) frozen snapshots as
> alpha/beta{1,2,3} development releases. Several other distros are doing
> that and I do believe they have good reasons for doing so, which might
> apply to us as well. For once, it's undeniable that there is some
> "announcement effect" in the world we live in: at each development
> release we might hope to get more explicit testing than only relying on
> the "you can always test testing and let us know" philosophy.
>
> In the Squeeze release we have done better than before by calling for
> explicit upgrade testing (kudos to the Release Team!), but a specific
> plan of alpha/beta/... might bring even more testing, especially if the
> media help us out with some hype.
>
> This proposal comes with its own drawbacks, as the need of synchronizing
> with d-i releases and CD/DVD images, but that might be mitigating by
> saying that a specific alpha/beta/ is only for upgrades and not for from
> scratch installations. Any other drawbacks of doing development
> releases I might have missed?
FWIW, d-i already has a history of numerous beta releases, including CD
images, although it was somewhat crippled by our inability to call them
betas of Debian as a whole, not just d-i (although I think we managed to
fool some people about that), as well as our inability to target them to
a non-moving suite. Those release have kind of dropped off (there was
only one for squeeze), due to those issues and also limited manpower in
the d-i team, which needs to be kept focused on d-i (and not on fixing
eg, bugs in the desktop). All of which I tried to find a way to address
with the CUT proposal.
--
see shy jo
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