On 15 May 2013 15:02, Arun C Murthy <a...@hortonworks.com> wrote: > Roman, > > Furthermore, before we rush into finding flaws and scaring kids at night > it would be useful to remember one thing: > Software has *bugs*. We can't block any release till the entire universe > validates it, in fact they won't validate it if we don't release since are > at the bottom of the stack. > >
more subtly: we aren't going to find all the corner case situations until things ship into the hands of people whose {networks, configs, applications, hardware} are different. Marking something as -beta means more people will use it, and find those problems, at a time when it is still possible for a fast turnaround on fixes. what we are implicitly saying with a "-beta" tag is " ready for others to use", which in Hadoop's case means "doesn't lose data unless you do something suicidal" and "we're not going to move APIs on you". The gulf from -beta to shipping is usually much less dramatic than -alpha to -beta, as it happens when everyone is happy that the last beta is good enough to push out. -Steve (who will be at the HUG in Sunnyvale this evening)