Aaron Bannert wrote:
>
> I believe that a strict QA process actually hurts the quality
> of OSS projects like Apache. We have a gigantic pool of
> talented users who would love to give us a hand by testing
> our latest and greatest in every contorted way imaginable.
> But we're holding out on them. We're saying that we know
> better than they do. I don't think we do. Sure, we should be
> testing our code, but there's absolutely no way that we can
> be perfect. Closely held ivory-tower QA doesn't scale any
> better at the ASF than it does at a proprietary company. But
> the QA that comes out of widely distributed release-candidates
> _does_ scale. Why don't we let the teeming masses have their
> fill?
>
I don't consider us a "closely held ivory-tower QA" and I would
say that if anyone knows of a talented pool of users would would
like to test RCs, then we should have a mechanism to use them.
That was the intent for the current/stable-testers list, but
we've never really used that as we should have.
The problem is really 2 fold:
1. The tarballs were being mistakenly described as the
official release. It's not released until we say so.
I think it's our responsibility to ensure that people
aren't mistakenly running pre-release s/w under the
impression that it is release.
2. That when all goes well, and the RC tarballs are approved,
they aren't changed at all... We are testing, really,
the accuracy of the tarball itself. This add some
complexity to the whole process.
I've been thinking over changing the 1.3 release process and
us actually tagging a tree as RC, creating actual 1.3.x-rc1
tarballs and people testing that, and having those very,
very open, but having the actual *release* tarballs
somewhat closed (again, to test the viability of the tarball,
not the code).
--
===========================================================================
Jim Jagielski [|] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [|] http://www.jaguNET.com/
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
will lose both and deserve neither" - T.Jefferson
