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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